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The History of ‘A Simple Gesture’
It started in Ashland, Oregon
Around 2010 John Javna, a best selling author and a committed humanitarian developed the idea of building a better community. His idea was to get neighborhoods in Ashland, OR to band together and share their excess food with others that needed the help. He came up with the idea of using a highly visible green bag. His vision was to accomplish two things;
- to get more food to those that need it, and
- bring communities closer together by working on problems together.
This simple yet powerful idea quickly took off. Today Ashland's program has the highest 'density' of any Home Food Donation Program in the country; about 30% of households participate! Bend Oregon isn't far behind.
The great thing about the Neighborhood Food Project model is how they are built around Neighborhood Coordinators. Their system is more 'people working with people' as the Neighborhood Coordinator activates her neighbors, collects the food, and delivers it to pantries.
A Simple Gesture starts!
About a year after Neighborhood Food Project was happening in Ashland, the father of one their board members was visiting from Paradise, CA. This gentleman, Jonathan Trivers, liked the idea so much he decided to start his own chapter in Paradise, CA. He made a few tweaks to the format and called it “A Simple Gesture”.
The main difference for "A Simple Gesture" was to work community wide, allowing anyone to register. They then arranged for drivers to pick up the food rather than the Neighborhood Food Project.
It could be debated which model was better, but the amount of food being collected would say it is a tie. Both programs worked very well.
2025: time to re-engineer the strategy
In late 2024 the Redwood Empire Food Bank (Sonoma, CA) asked a retired Systems Engineer/Workflow Analyst by the name of Mark Martindill to develop a Home Food Donation system.
One of the 1st things he did was study the existing systems in detail. After interviewing about 1/2 the program leaders and collecting data on most of the 115 chapters the problem became clear. They were very difficult to run. Some programs required 30-50 hours of time per event, occurring every other month, to operate. The success of growing turned into barrier to grow.
It was simply too hard to find people that were willing to commit to such a logistical challenge. Existing Chapters only wanted to replace lost donors and new chapters weren't happening. From 2023 to 2025 less than 5 new chapters came on the scene and more than that closed shop.
It was time to rethink everything. Mark developed the ASG Web App. At a cost of nearly $100,000 the app solved the problem of time and complexity. What used to take 30 hours could be done in less than one! You can read more about what this app does elsewhere on this website.
Now it was time to take the new model everywhere. After a lot of conversations with "A Simple Gesture", "Porch Communities", and "Neighborhood Food Project" a plan emerged.
The Greensboro, NC chapter lead by Leslie Lloyd and her board agreed to hand over the future development of "A Simple Gesture" to Mark. They decided to retain the control of "A Simple Gesture.Org", because of investments they had made in marketing materials, so Mark decided to make a small brand adjustment and call the program "A Simple Gesture - helps", and has obtained several domains; The main information website is on www.asghelps.org. And the powerful web app, ASG Web App, can be found on www.ASGWebApp.org.
Mark has continued to work with Neighborhood Food Project. Porch Communities has decided to move forward on their own. 'A Simple Gesture' and Neighborhood Food Project are in full sharing mode; exchanging ideas and trying to help each other be as good as they can be.
Meanwhile, Mark is launching new 'A Simple Gesture' chapters. Starting about April 2025, there 25 new chapters have opened up and will be operating by the end of 2025. These new chapters along with some of the existing chapters are all using the ASG Web App. The new approach is vastly more efficient allowing all the time to be spent on building up the donor base, as it should be.
Where are we headed?
The "A Simple Gesture - helps" team is focused on adding 900 new chapters to the food donation system by the end of 2030. The goal is for these chapters to be adding 450 million pounds of food to reduce food insecurity and hunger.
This goal is aggressive and many would say it's unreachable, even foolish. We don't agree! Perhaps they are right, but if people are suffering and we must respond to the problem because it's getting worse. Federal support for food support is declining at an alarming rate, meanwhile more Americans are food insecure than at any time in the last several decades.
We can reach this goal because the ASG Web App isn't going to get tired. Its was built for high volume and its ready to support any chapter of any size. In our past it was believed a chapter should not get bigger than 1000 or so donors, we can now handle hundreds of thousands in the same community.
The missing pieces are two;
- We need Operating Partners. We are working with several national groups to get this done. Credit Unions, Rotary/Lions/Kiwanas, and Real Estate Firms have all shown an interest in this program at a national scale. Any one of them could get to the 900+ chapter goal by themselves. It's really just a decision, the methodology is ready to go.
- We need Brand Partners; We don't need a lot of money. The bags cost a little bit. What costs the most is the "incentive campaign" where we can make large financial donations to other non profits that encourage their network to register for 'A Simple Gesture'. And to do this, we need the funding a Brand Partner can provide. The good news is, it's doable! The marketing value of having a brand on the high visibility bags is, by itself, a good business decision and more than enough money to make it all happen.
Branding
We like to think of ourselves as "Brand Agnostic". We just want people to put more food into the system to relieve food insecurity and hunger. To some extent our "A Simple Gesture" and "A Simple Gesture - helps" brand offers some value, but this is really a very 'small area' strategy. We don't need national exposure, we need communities across America to take this on as their own, call it what you want.
Here are just a few examples;
- Paradise - A Simple Gesture
- A Simple Gesture of Greensboro
- Santa Rosa’s Simple Gesture
- Food Coalition - Harrisonburg
- Chico Food Project
Please, Join Us!!
