Dignity: We believe that people and food have inherent value and deserve to be treated with respect. About half the food we collect is “short-dated”, which does NOT mean bad or old. Our volunteers and those at our food access partners put a lot of effort into ensuring the food quality is good before it hits the shelves. As part of this process, volunteers identified a reduction in quality of produce from a grocer on their route. The T2T team put together visuals that demonstrated preferred quality for different types of produce and shared it with this store (and others). As a result, this partner has become one of our highest performing grocery partners in quality AND amount of produce!
Love: We show love for our neighbors through food and none demonstrates this more clearly than our friend and colleague José who works in the produce department of one of our grocery partners. Sometimes, food for donation is pulled from the shelves after our pick up time. With limited space, it’s likely the store would need to toss it before the next pick up. José couldn’t bear to see it go to waste and began delivering it directly to T2T on his lunch break. That’s the kind of dedication and love for community we need!
Collaboration: This year, we saw the effects of a strong network in several ways.
When Coralville Pantry’s cooler and freezer went down, T2T offered up extra cold storage space that saved thousands of dollars worth of food and kept pantry doors open.
CommUnity Food Bank staff used their equipment to unload several large scale deliveries to T2T from trucking companies. This benefited not only their clients, but helped T2T share the bounty with partners across the county.
So many of our partners stepped up to distribute more than 40,000 pounds of potatoes, including partners like Open Heartland who set up special distribution hours to accommodate the opportunity.
Using our big truck on a regular weekly route, T2T transported 266,000 pounds of food from HACAP Food Reservoir to CommUnity Food Bank.
Appreciation: On a route last year, a volunteer learned that one of our biggest partners had food we weren’t receiving because the donor didn’t think we had the capacity. T2T staff leapt into action, set up meetings with the donor, and restructured several routes. Volunteers weathered significant changes to their routes and food access partners adjusted their volunteer schedules to accept the influx of food. All of this effort resulted in a 72% increase in food from that donor! An impossibility without volunteers, partners, or our talented team.
When you picture the mission of T2T – do you see a volunteer walking the aisles of a grocery store or loading up in the parking lot? A cargo van packed to the brim with boxes of food, or a T2T vehicle making deliveries around town? This year, more than 100 volunteers each week dedicated 8,300 hours to our route based food rescue program.
Routes represent 66% of the food we recover, but did you know that nearly 1 million pounds of food comes from our expanded food rescue initiatives? This includes harvesting from local farms, gardeners, food processors, warehouses, and even the food transportation industry. By expanding our team and building new partnerships, we said “yes” to more food rescue opportunities than ever before. Take a look below at the results of a few key initiatives.
This letter appears in Table to Table’s 2024 Impact Report, hitting mailboxes soon!
We’re fortunate to have had so many opportunities to capture food for our neighbors this year as the food safety net is stretched to breaking. We’ve seen firsthand how rising grocery prices—up 25% since early 2021(USDA)—have put additional strain on our neighbors. Looking back at our data from 2019, pantry visitors often needed food resources once per month or several times per year.In comparison, recent research by Johnson County public health shows that 79% of surveyed food pantry visitors reported they are now visiting a pantry 2 or more times a month. Meanwhile, SNAP benefits enrollment in Iowa is at a 15 year low. Low SNAP enrollment can be a product of multiple factors, including application & recertification barriers, low benefit amounts, as well as asset tests and income limitations that prevent more people from qualifying. One thing is for certain, we know it is not because there are less people facing hunger in Iowa. The pressing need for food in our community spurred our staff and volunteers to work harder and dedicate more hours to food recovery than ever before. As a result, we delivered 2.7 million pounds of foodthis year, an increase of half a million pounds! Sixty percent of that additional food was produce, protein, and dairy.
We celebrate the dedication of our volunteers and partners and the impact of all the food they’ve distributed. We also celebrate you, our community, providing such a crucial foundation to our work. Although food rescue is unpredictable, it is thanks to all of of you that we are primed to respond to every food opportunity and the changing needs of our community. And while every pound of food matters, our work is so much more than that number. We recover food and deliver on our mission with a core set of values that center people, community, and the strong connections we build and maintain. These values guide our efforts to reclaim food, reduce food waste, and address food insecurity while promoting respect, empathy, collaboration, and love in all aspects of our work.
With your support, we can continue to fight food insecurity and build a more connected, compassionate community.
Nicki Ross
Executive Director
Table to Table bridges the gap between abundance and hunger. Our mission is to increase food equity and reduce environmental harm by collecting and redistributing surplus food through partners to people who can use it.
We couldn’t have accomplished all that we did in 2024 without our dedicated team of volunteers, board members, staff, and AmeriCorps members.
This letter from Executive Director Nicki Ross appeared in Table to Table’s Impact Report for fiscal year 2021.
When I think of this past year and the challenges it presented, I keep coming back to an overwhelming sense of gratitude; gratitude to you, the staff, volunteers, and each of our partners. It’s also difficult to summarize a year that feels like a decade, but I’m going to try.
We have learned a lot in our 25 years of operation, yet this year highlighted the challenges we face in fighting food insecurity. Most notably, how the inequalities in our food system are underpinned by structural racism and social inequality. It is a stark reminder that this crisis existed long before the pandemic and that food waste is inextricably linked to equity. As you’ll read in this report, in partnership with the incredible hunger relief network, we found even more ways to reclaim resources and increase food access.
Partnerships are the foundation that enable us to act quickly, expand, and diversify the ways we meet the changing needs of our community. We found new sources for our most requested foods and delivered more of these resources to the agencies that are on the front lines of a once-in-a-generation national hunger crisis. In a year when food was scarce and the need was greater than ever, Johnson County food pantries distributed more pounds of food per person than in the previous two years.
Our community understood that the first priority during a crisis is to make sure people are fed. Our daily work was made to do exactly this, feed our neighbors. To do this, we lean heavily on the collective power of people. You fueled our response – you are why, despite continued uncertainty, we’re in a position to serve our community for the months and years ahead.
Let me express one more time gratefulness for our T2T team and the staff and volunteers of all our partners who work tirelessly. Their commitment was unbowed by the sustained adversity of this year. Their work, guided by their hearts, their creativity, and courage allowed us to innovate and lead. I am incredibly proud to see them do what sometimes seems impossible.
Thanks to the generous and unprecedented support of our community last year, Table to Table will be able to invest in the future of our critical services. More than 50% of the 2020-21 increase in donations came from unexpected and one-time sources. We will invest these funds in a more robust operating reserve and use this revenue as matching funds for infrastructure like our relocation and new food donation and logistics software. All of this will ensure a healthy and productive future for Table to Table and the hunger relief network in Johnson County.
Interview conducted by Patty Meier, Table to Table Board of Directors
As the pandemic stretches capacity and resources, DVIP continues to meet basic needs of those seeking shelter and support in crisis. As a long time partner DVIP has found ways to utilize rescued food to bolster their service offerings. Table to Table volunteers pack boxes of food for Domestic Violence Intervention Program (DVIP) nearly every day of the week, helping to ensure that DVIP can meet their clients’ basic needs.
“Table to Table helps us provide options in regard to food security,” says Elias Ortiz, the Director of Shelter and Youth Services at DVIP. T2T delivers food for immediate meal needs and also stocks the DVIP food pantry, which serves a broader group of clients beyond those in need of immediate shelter.
DVIP provides comprehensive support and advocacy services to victim survivors, focusing on immediate and long-term safety, empowerment, dignity, and hope. “Our mission is to empower individuals,” says Ortiz. “The gateway to DVIP services is the crisis line, so our primary audience is intimate partner violence.”
DVIP serves eight counties – District 6 in the state’s new system of funding domestic violence services. “State funding cuts have led to the elimination of domestic violence shelters from 32 to 8 statewide,” says Ortiz. The eight remaining shelters have to serve more people and compete for reduced funding, which is part of why DVIP expanded to additional counties.
“The [multi-county expansion] has brought challenges in establishing rapport, building trust, providing transportation, etc,” Ortiz says.
DVIP can build rapport and trust with individuals by immediately helping them stabilize, meet their basic needs, and help them maintain dignity through crisis. By building foundational trust, DVIP can then begin addressing clients’ trauma. The organization seeks out partnerships that can help meet essential needs and stretch their financial funding, allowing them to focus on their primary supportive services.
DVIP’s shelter is open 24/7, 365 days a year, serving 360 individuals in an average year. The shelter is always full. As soon as someone moves out, someone else moves in that same day. “Even more so during the pandemic, tensions at home are higher, and there are fewer places to go,” Ortiz explains. More than half of the individuals living in the shelter are under 18, with most of them being age six and younger. They often come in with only the clothes they are wearing.
DVIP has had to reduce their shelter capacity this past year due to COVID to allow for social distancing measures. Because of capacity limitations, DVIP sometimes utilizes hotel shelters for survivors. Partnership with T2T has been helping the organization meet basic food needs differently. Food collected and delivered by Table to Table can go with the families to hotel rooms. T2T has placed an emphasis on funneling more microwavable meals collected from food rescue routes to support families sheltering in hotels.
Ortiz has noticed that since the beginning of the pandemic in Johnson County, local nonprofits have learned how to be creative in their communications with each other to collectively meet the needs of the community they serve. In addition, they’ve learned to provide services in different ways to meet client needs, and DVIP is no exception. Ortiz and his staff have developed a “bed and breakfast” arrangement for some clients that allows them to stay with individuals in private homes, where they have a room and food provided and are able to stay close to their home.
“We [are serving] so many people right now that have been impacted not just by COVID, but also from losing jobs, or are under stress because there are fewer places … to be connected,” Ortiz says. “T2T is not just providing food items, but providing options for people to be safe.”
We thank DVIP for the important work they are doing to help our neighbors and for partnering with us to strengthen their services for survivors.
Thursday, Feb. 25 is DVIP’s 24th Annual Souper Bowl, reimagined to keep everybody safe in light of Covid-19. Learn more here.
By February of 2020, Table to Table (T2T) was poised to report another year of tremendous community effort. We were on track to rescue more than 2 million pounds of food. We spent the fall of 2019 adding to our team and working on process improvements. Like all of you, we could not have envisioned how our year would end or that our new team and improved systems would be so thoroughly put to the test.
Our first and most significant challenge was losing 80% of our volunteers in March. Students left campus and uncertainty about safety led us to ask volunteers at high-risk for COVID complications to take a break. The City of Iowa City, Aero Rental, Bur Oak Land Trust, and more than 60 new and returning volunteers stepped up to continue the mission.
Amid major disruptions in the food system, we received calls to rescue 120,000 pounds of food from food transport drivers, hotels, farms, and food processors, all of which was above and beyond the 45,000 pounds we regularly rescue each week.
Letting any nutritious food go to waste at a time when some of our hunger relief partners were serving double and triple the number of people in need is simply unacceptable. For our neighbors enduring this health and financial crisis, T2T deliveries are the difference between families nourishing themselves with good protein, fresh fruits, and veggies or filling their bellies with food that is plentiful, cheap, and far less nutritious.
Through recipient partner agencies, we have served 14,800 people during the health and economic crisis.
During this time, T2T delivered enough food for at least one nutritious meal per day for every food insecure family in Johnson County. We have more work to do to meet the full need.
Over 24 years, Table to Table has become known for our strong community relationships and our reliability. This year, we add something else to that list…resiliency. For T2T, resiliency is a culmination of resources only possible because of you. We have seen the community come together, like never before, to join us in ensuring that despite the pandemic, people are getting the nutrition they need.
Because of your unprecedented contributions of money and time, we were able to rise to the challenges presented by the pandemic and accomplish more than we ever imagined.
Please continue to stand with us—to lend us your hands, your time, and your resources—so our community members can continue to
rely on us to ensure that everybody has access to fresh, healthy food for themselves and their families.
This year, two of our oldest food rescue vans broke down for good. Without them, we would miss 25% of our food deliveries. Thanks to these donors for their gifts of $1,000 or more and to the many others for their smaller but equally impactful gifts, we were able to replace our vehicles. Each of our new vans will make 25,000 food pickups and deliveries during their lifetime!
Together, our two new vehicles have rescued 400,000 lbs. of food…so far!
Iowa City Masonic Foundation
Johnson County
HACAP Food Reservoir
Community Foundation of Johnson County
City of Iowa City
Hills Bank
St. Joseph Church
Burton & Christine Wilcox
Bingo & Friends
City of Coralville
City of North Liberty
Deery Brothers of Iowa City
Charlotte Fairlie
City of Hills
Jerry Swails & Christine Taylor
Joshua Christain
volunteers and those at our food access partners put a lot of effort into ensuring the food quality is good before it hits the shelves. As part of this process, volunteers identified a reduction in quality of produce from a grocer on their route. The T2T team put together visuals that demonstrated preferred quality for different types of produce and shared it with this store (and others). As a result, this partner has become one of our highest performing grocery partners in quality AND amount of produce!
Our community understood that the first priority during a crisis is to make sure people are fed. 
