Introduction

In the late 1960s, hunger had become a huge public issue in the United States. After the society learned the existence of hunger, it had resulted in specialties from government and academic field along with nonprofit organizations and advocacy groups to take action on how to eliminate the effect of poverty such as federal programs and projects. The definitions of hunger were varied and the measurement of hunger was generally indirect and lack of consensus. According to Eisinger’s statement in 1996-1998, the term “hunger” was often used with lack of nutrition, medical and dietary date to measure the problem. However, the discordance at that time had made those participants’ efforts into a product that was made of professionals and political competing outcome. (National Research Concil)

Fortunately, there’s a retired businessman who had come up an idea that had a humongous impact to this hunger crisis in the last 1960s, who was known as John van Hengel. John van Hengel was lived in Phoenix, AZ after his retirement. The food bank concept was inspired by a desperate mother he met at a grocery store garbage bin who was trying to find food for her children. While John van Hengel was talking to her, she told John during the conversation that there should be a place where people can store discarded food and for people who were needed to pick it up. Instead of throwing away and being wasted, people could make the discarded food more valuable, at least to those whom were desperately needed. With this concept, a lives saving business was born.

The very first food bank was established in Phoenix, AZ known as the St.Mary’s Food Bank. At the very first year, John and his team of volunteers distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. And the success of the food bank was quickly spread to other states. By 1977, there were 18 cities had established food banks across the country. As the food banks were steadily growing, John then created a national organization for food banks.

Then in 1979, he had established the Second Harvest, which was later called The Nation’s Food Bank Network. In 2008, it then changed its name to what we known today – Feeding America as to better reflect their mission of the organization to the world. Nowadays, Feeding America has become the largest domestic hunger relief organization in the United States with a powerful network of 200 food banks across the country. In this report, we are going to do a SWOT analysis of this organization, to find out what the factor is to make this organization strong and hard to compete, and what the potential threat or issue is that the organization will be facing in the future.

Strength

Since the year Feeding America was established, it has been continually fighting against the hunger in United States. Now Feeding America has become a nationwide network of 200 food banks which are across the whole nation. Till this day, they have been provided food for more than 46 million people through 60,000 food pantries and meal programs and engaged with more than 2 million volunteers on monthly basis across the United States. One of their strengths is their innovative strategies which help them to capture and distribute food quantity with great efficiency. With large amount of hungry people in need to be fed the process of getting food and efficiently distribute them to those hungry Americans requires a dynamic infrastructure and sophisticated management.

To Feeding America, serving meals to the hungers is not just randomly collecting food from anywhere. They’re focusing on monitoring and ensuring the people they are feeding have enough nutritious food for themselves and their families. They are not only putting effort in sourcing and encouraging people to donate foods that could maintain good health and follow the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines, they also made a large investments to secure fresh fruits and vegetables in order to secure and support the health and wellness to the people they serve. Till this day, 71% of foods that are received by the network are the foods they called “Foods to Encourage” which includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains and protein.

Another strength and the biggest strength that Feeding America hold is their supporters.Those supporters are not only donating food or be volunteers, they also provide support on analyzing and developing a better, concrete and measurable improvements to the society. Feeding America categorized their supporter into five categories: visionary partners, leadership partner, mission partner, guiding partners and supporting partners and partners.

With visionary partners, they support Feeding America by using their own resources to help either offering strategic support or uniting their own customers and partners to spread or build the public image for Feeding America. With leadership partners, they support Feeding America with investing in local food bank in order to help feeding neighbors whom are in need. Mission partners offer financially or physically support while guiding partners and supporting partners give mission partners the basic supports. Feeding America could be the largest non profit organization, those supporters that Feeding America partners with is the strength that it could steadily grow and be the most influential organization to the United States.

Weakness

Hunger in the U.S is still an ongoing problem even until today, Although Feeding America is the largest food bank network in the United States, and most of the people still recognize it as a charity program. Even though they have partnered with a lot of well-known companies throughout the country, to the public, Feeding America is part of those companies’ charity program. Moreover, there are tons of different small food banks across the United States, and they are too small to be part of the Feeding America. The problem is not only these small food banks have become a threat to Feeding America, but public recognized the small food banks as a real nonprofit organization instead of Feeding America this largest organization.

Opportunity

Despite the fact that Feeding America already is the largest nonprofit organization in the U.S, there are still opportunities could help this organization grow. For instance, instead of rejecting those small food banks, Feeding America could yield the relationships with those local food banks in order to gain their public image and by cooperating with those food banks can also help the public to understand the fact that Feeding America is not a program but a national known nonprofit organization.

Threats

The potential threat is actually from one of their strength – feeding with nutritious food. The challenge of providing nutritious food to the hungry people is whether the food bank has enough space to store and refrigerate those perishable nutritious foods. Furthermore, how the organization can ensure the food safety while they transport the food across the country. Feeding America is the largest organization that mainly offers nutritious food to the hungry people; therefore, the food safety issue could be the potential threat to this organization.

Other than potential threat, U.S economic issues and their competitors are also unavoidable threats to Feeding America. Economic issues could lead to the possibility of decreasing investments or funding of Feeding America’s supporters, which is unpredictable. Moreover, their competitors are also asking for supporters’ investment and funding, which has caused Feeding America more difficulties to gain or maintain their relationship with their partners.

Summary

In the past years, Feeding America has been the top of nonprofits organization and has made their name throughout the country. With the efforts and ideas that they had put in and tried to fight with the hunger issue, this noble idea is not getting easier even Feeding America has made their footprints throughout the country. With more and more people recognized the hunger issue, more people have joined in and established their own small business and try to help the society. However, this situation has resulted in that public cannot see the big image of Feeding America while there’re so many small local food banks take away their sights.

Last but not least, despite all the small flaws or challenges that Feeding America is going to face, they still insist with their vision and mission of their organization. Throughout the years, they have been trying to end the hunger of America, and they have successfully brought not only public’s attention, but also lots of companies to participate in this big project. Even though the hungriness is not an easy task to be completed, with Feeding America and other supporters’ efforts and investment, one day, the United States might actually become a hunger-free country.