Every year, Project by Project organizes Project LEAD, a one day consulting hackathon where we invite working professionals to donate their time toward brainstorming an actionable and innovative solution for one of our partner nonprofits. On Saturday, September 7, Project by Project NY’s Outreach team hosted Project LEAD with Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, a national 501(c)3 nonprofit food rescue organization that operates across the United States and is headquartered in New York City.

Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC) aligns directly with Project by Project’s 2024 campaign theme, as the nonprofit focuses on redistributing excess food to people experiencing food insecurity. RLC uses its purpose-built web application to crowdsource community members, labeled “Rescuers,” to redistribute food from businesses to nearby nonprofits that serve food insecure people throughout the city. Over the next 5 years, RLC plans to double its output from rescuing 4.5 million pounds of food per year to 10 million pounds per year.

During Project LEAD, 20+ volunteers spent the afternoon learning about RLC and working together in teams to come up with innovative solutions for RLC’s Project LEAD challenge: “Create a viral campaign that helps spread awareness of food rescue while also enabling action.” Ten years ago, food rescue was thought to be illegal among the general public. Today it is a strong, socially accepted solution to help those in need. RLC wants to build on this momentum to create the next “ice bucket challenge,” the viral video challenge that took over the internet in 2014, bringing awareness to ALS. Within the 3 hour hackathon, teams solutioned based on this problem statement, put together slide decks presenting their idea with mock designs and language, and prepared to present. 

“Team Koala,” pictured below, was selected by RLC as the winning team and received a small prize. They presented multiple ideas, all drawing from the viral “ice bucket challenge” video mentioned earlier: the Kiwi Challenge, where a person films themselves eating a kiwi whole, the Leftover Fridge Challenge, where the individual would film themselves making a meal with leftovers, and the Food Budget Challenge, where the filmer would attempt to buy a full meal with only $5 and document the experience. They explained that these challenges would bring awareness to food insecurity and the difficulty with limited resources to source nutritious meals.

Some takeaways from the winning team:

• “Anyone can be an advocate.”

• “Everyone had a unique lens that they used to approach the situation.”

• “At any scale, there can be an impact.” 

Overall, all the participants learned about food insecurity and how it affects our AAPI community. One volunteer, Megan, mentioned that Project LEAD was a “fun and meaningful way to meet new people, especially around an issue that [she] cares about a lot.” Thank you to Rescuing Leftover Cuisine for partnering with us on this important mission and to this year’s Project LEAD volunteers for contributing their time and creativity. Project by Project NY looks forward to hosting the next Project LEAD in 2025.