Welcome!

1.  We give you a bright green recyclable bag,  you fill it with shelf stable pantry foods and place it on your doorstep.  

2. We leave behind a Thank You card with a needs list specific to your local pantry, and a new bag to use next time.

3.  Our volunteers pick up the food and take it to a local pantry or Food Bank

That’s it! ….. 

• The program is very simple, give it a try
• The “needs list” is customized and updated for your area.  The food we ask for is the food that will make the biggest impact.  
• The chapters are 100% volunteer, its a ‘near zero cost’ approach
• The food stays in the community:  “neighbors helping neighbors”

Hunger and Food Insecurity  are getting worse. We have to do something different, its not tolerable for our neighbors in our communities to lack the most basic human need.  As someone once wrote “when you are hungry, nothing else matters”. One in three single mom households face this unacceptable problem. The children in those families are victims. Lack of healthy food doesn’t just impact physical health, it impacts self-esteem. We have a new solution that’s been around for centuries.  

Problem #1:   Nearly all hunger relief programs rely on big money;  federal and state aid, big grants, large foundations, and major corporations fund the solutions.   The problem is these solutions fade in and out. They aren’t sustainable. “Food Insecurity” is the lack of predictable and sufficient food resources.

Solution;  We exist to bring in an entirely different solution, people like you.  This is a true grass-roots solution, bringing in neighbors to help neighbors.  Neighbors don’t come and go, this is a sustainable program built for the long term. It is recurring and predictable.

Problem #2:  Current hunger relief programs are very expensive.   A food bank in a big city can have an operating budget greater than $20 million.  

Solution;  Our system approaches zero cost.  Hunger relief organizations can convert $1 of financial aid into $3 dollars of actual food. We convert $1 into as much as $200 dollars of food. Our system does not require any storage or expensive logistics.  Our WebApp and support are free to anyone that wants to use them.  

Problem #3: The vast majority of food going into hunger relief programs is food most of us would not eat. Expiring produce, high sugar cakes and cookies, and high sugared cereals make up 80% or more of food going into the system. Sadly, it’s the ‘nature of the beast’. Grocery stores get fined if they throw away food, Food Banks have found a home for those same foods. It’s a worthy solution, but walk through a pantry and ask yourself if we are doing enough to feed people the same foods we want for a healthy and productive lifestyle. 

Solution;  We target ‘center of plate’ foods. Foods people donate on a recurring basis are higher in nutritional value. We provide a ‘needs list’ that targets the foods most needed by each local chapter. We provide the same food we eat to build higher self-esteem and better health.

Provide state-of-the-art methods and technology to make it as easy as possible for people to donate food to others in need.   

Our long-term goal; Provide 450 million pounds of food annually to reduce food insecurity and hunger in America.   

There are two ways to get this done;  

1. Open 900+ chapters across the country, making the program accessable to >70% of Americans.  Today only about 1% of Americans have access in their area.   
2. Increase density (the % of participation) across all chapters so that 8% - 12% of households in each community are registered and participating.   

One in three single parent households are food insecure right now; We don’t have time on our side. We need to move fast. This is a call for action, lets do this.

We call it “ Simple Gesture” because we do everything to make the donor experience easy. They are the heart of the system, they are busy people, and they have choices of when, where and how to help.  Everything was designed around the donor.

We do the same for our volunteer drivers, providing them a simple web-app with turn by turn directions taking through their route and ending at the pantry or food bank.  

To make it all work, we built a state-of-the-art Web App that is run by Chapter Admins and Event managers.   We wish this side of the coin was simple, but the fact is part requires some technical assistance.   But we make a big effort here as well; every main feature has a video to show what to do, and the help guide is easy navigate in a menu-format with lots of screen shots.    It takes about 2 hours to become fully equipped to do anything needed to make all those donors and drivers happy.  

Its main features;

• Campaigns;  these are the “donor drive” events that create the scale of donors needed to meet the growing demand for food.  Each campaign has a unique QR and URL Link, making it easy to distribute in emails, social media, and on banners or information cards.  And each has its own unique data traffic to know how they went.   Users click a hyperlink or scan a QR code and get a custom built web page that asks them to register. The look and feel is very  local; it is about their community, so each page is custom built by the local chapter.
• Personal Campaigns;  Every donor is a source for more donors.   Each one will have their own personal site page. They then broadcast the QR code or hyperlink to their network of contacts. Imagine if one donor can bring just 2 more?  Then those 2 bring 2 more? It doesn’t take long to see the incredible power of the ‘Personal Campaign’ feature. 
• Pick-up Event Management;   Imagine organizing thousands of donors, hundreds of drivers all delivering to a dozen pantries in the space of 2 hours, and then doing it again month after month.  Well, we have!  What used to take 50+ hours to plan and organize now takes less than one hour.   Donors and Drivers are grouped into highly efficient routes.  The routes can be changed on the fly if circumstances dictate. A dashboard gives the Event Manager visibility real-time as drivers proceed. Drivers get turn-by-turn instructions from google maps.    
• Messaging;  We provide a tool to share information with your donors and drivers. Every email or text is logged.   
• Reporting;  We have reports for everything. Imagine this, set up a table in front of a grocery store and register donors. A year later,  you want to go back, so you show the store manager how many families were fed because of that event a year ago. The data is rich in detail, drill-able to many levels, and tells you what you want to know.  

There are three vital participants to make these programs work;  each play a critical role;

• The donors are any household or business that wants to get involved.   Donors register on our site www.asgeventmanager.com.   Once registered they are reminded about the next pickup day and the specific needs of there nearby pantry.    
• Drivers come from the pool of donors.   As a donor registers we ask them to consider driving.  About one in ten agree, which is more than enough to get the job done.
• Operating Partners are business and social clubs, church groups, or just a group of friends that want to oversee the “Simple Gesture Chapter”.   They use our ‘ASG-helps App’ to plan and operate the pickup events, and run ‘donor drives’ to bring more donors into the programs.