This tool (see important update below) was created by a team from the Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Association to calculate the impact of financial support provided to AmpleHarvest.org in terms of pounds of food donated by America’s growers and the number of servings of food available to hungry families nationwide. Because the heart of AmpleHarvest.org’s work is not acquisition and distribution of food but rather expanding an ever increasing network of local growers who have surplus harvests they want to donate to their local food pantry, and because of the viral nature of AmpleHarvest.org solution, dollars donated have a sustained and expanding impact.
The team, using information from publicly available sources including the USDA, the National Gardening Association, the Master Gardener Program as well as data from AmpleHarvest.org’s own multiyear surveys (analysis by Cisco Systems) was able to determine the impact on one time as well as recurring donations of a given dollar amount over a span of 20 years. If you have questions about the source data or how this works, know that about several dozen rows of calculations are hidden for visual simplicity. We’ll be happy to explain the details on request.
The use this tool, enter the donated amount in cell C33 below. Below are two separate analysis – one for a single one time and one recurring donations.
Important Update: This tool was created in early 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic when America had 42 million gardeners. That number has skyrocketed to 61 million gardeners, meaning the amount of surplus food grown and available for donation has also skyrocketed. We will update this tool later in the year to reflect these changes after gathering additional data, but for now, you should view the impact of donated dollars as being significantly greater than this tool is showing.
Note… if you have a problem viewing the below spreadsheet, try opening the page in incognito mode (in chrome, right click on this link and then press the letter g)