John
van Hengel set out to change his life and ended up changing
the world. After a divorce and serious injury, he relocated
to Arizona and got involved in several charities. While
volunteering at a soup kitchen, a woman told him that
she often got the food to feed her children by going
through grocery store garbage cans. She told him that
the food was perfectly good and that, just as there
is a bank to store money, there should be a place to
store excess food until people needed it.
With
this idea as his inspiration, John van Hengel contacted
local groceries and bakeries and in 1967 he set up the
St. Mary's Foodbank in Phoenix, Arizona -- the first
food bank.
In
1976 John van Hengel started America's Second Harvest
- a national food bank network that has grown to include
more than 200 food banks that donate food to 50,000
agencies which provide food for 23 million Americans.
