In FY25, T2T recovered food from the Iowa City Farmer’s Market every Saturday, delivering 8,600 lbs. of hyperlocal, farm fresh produce to Johnson County neighbors. Long-time T2T volunteer Mary Palmberg has been running the Farmer’s Market route since 2020. Mary is not only a food rescue superhero, but an avid T2T spokesperson as well, educating new market vendors about what we do and how they can become a food donor. Since Mary took the lead, we’ve doubled the number of food donors from the farmer’s market!
Will Keen and Dedi Walker deliver food to Ecumenical Towers, a senior assisted living complex, on their food rescue route every week. But they don’t just drop the food at the door and head to the next stop, Will and Dedi cart it all inside and set it out on tables for residents to easily pick up. Building relationships is a crucial part of our food rescue volunteer role. “They really look forward to it when Table to Table comes, so folks are always waiting while we set up the food for them. We get to know what foods they like best and whenever we get some of that on a route we make sure to save it for them.” – Dedi Walker
The phone rings: a truck driver has a pallet of beef rejected by the customer for having the wrong brand label. Perfectly good food with nowhere to go. Within minutes, T2T is on it. These rescues move fast. Drivers are on a deadline. As staff Gina Hudson says, “It’s always a team effort. It’s unpredictable and even more fast-moving than our day-to-day food rescue routes, and comes together through real-time teamwork.”
In FY25, volunteers gave 11,500 hours to drive routes, glean fields, and move truckloads of food.Together, we turned $699,000 into $8.4 million worth of food.
This content appears in the FY25 Annual Impact Report. View a PDF of the mailed version here.
With a grant from Volunteer Iowa, support from United Way, and a pilot group from MidWestOne, this year we offered group farm harvest opportunities. Gleaning volunteer and MidWestOne Bank’s President & COO Len Devaisher shared, “What a privilege it is to support the powerful work of Table to Table. Gleaning captures the essence of what makes Table to Table so special: nothing wasted, working together so that all of our neighbors have the opportunity to enjoy fresh, quality food.” We can’t send a group of 10 out on a route in a two-seater van, but you can join us in the field! To volunteer, email gleaning@table2table.org
Every crisis brings a choice. Do we keep going as usual, or do we pause and ask what this moment demands? A crisis is always a failure of systems, and at Table to Table we have long seen that food waste is one of those failures. Good food going to waste is not a problem of scarcity, but of systems breaking down. Food recovery is how we respond.
We see cracks in the system as openings. Openings to recover what would be lost. Openings to do things differently. Openings to innovate, to collaborate, to build something better. What sustains us is not just getting through hard times. It is the courage to put neighbors first and to keep asking: What do families need right now? What do we need to do differently? How can we respond together? This year we saw plenty of cracks and failures in the systems of the food safety net. Looming federal cuts to SNAP, reductions in free USDA food for pantries, and rising grocery costs placed more pressure on families already struggling to make ends meet.
Yet, instead of breaking apart, the Food Access Network came together with more resolve than ever to serve one in five county residents, more than 25,000 neighbors in all. We came together to plan new strategies for the challenges ahead. Working together gives us hope, as one partner shared: “I felt like an equal shareholder, not just the little guy at the table. I left feeling hopeful that together we could really make a difference and move the needle.”
When the Food Access Network identified partners who were serving larger family sizes with specific cultural needs, Table to Table allocated family sized bulk proteins and culturally familiar foods to meet those needs. When one partner reduced hours, others stepped up, and Table to Table quickly rerouted deliveries and directed neighbors to those resources so no family went without a meal.
When we lost AmeriCorps support for gleaning, staff and volunteers filled the gaps, maintaining critical farm relationships and harvesting thousands of pounds of produce. Partnership allows us to stretch every dollar, distributing 2.6 million pounds of food to meet the scale of community need with efficiency and impact far beyond our size. This is what it means to build something better. By choosing collaboration in the face of crisis, we are reshaping food access so every neighbor has the food they need and deserve.
Nicki Ross, Executive Director
60% of our work is funded by individual donors. Every mile driven, every meal delivered, every neighbor served starts with your gift. Donate Today: https://table2table.org/donation/
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.
I’ve often heard the work of Table to Table described as a “simple” idea. We like that redistributing surplus food that would otherwise go uneaten is a no-nonsense idea. However, this only works smoothly if it’s on a solid foundation of relationships, collaboration, and connection: essential components for a healthy food system and healthy individuals. Essential… but it turns out: not simple. There isn’t really anything simple about leveraging the strengths of organizations and individuals throughout the community to make food accessible to thousands of people each year.
Here are some of the ways we’ve done that this year:
T2T staff deliver a truckload of fruit from Costco to Coralville Community Food Pantry.
We nurtured partnerships to prioritize equity and access by redistributing food in a way that promotes fairness and addresses the specific needs of different communities. Doing this means not doing what’s easiest but finding the way to do what’s most just. We redistributed food purchased by local food hub Field to Family from marginalized local farmers through the Iowa Valley Resource Conservation & Development-led Local Food Purchasing Assistance Program (LFPA).
We continued our partnership with Grow: Johnson County to deliver over 50,000 pounds of produce grown in their educational farm program, many of which are culturally-specific vegetables grown at the request of our neighbors who will nutritionally and emotionally benefit from these foods that make them feel at home.
Through collaboration with Feeding America Food Bank HACAP Food Reservoir, we better understand the regional food insecurity landscape and work together to ensure adequate resource distribution in Eastern Iowa. Examples include, redistributing thousands of pounds of ripe strawberries from HACAP, and HACAP offering 10,000 pounds of protein recovered by T2T to partners across 7 counties.
Strengthening our anti-hunger network increases our adaptability and allowed us to respond to more than a dozen large volume, time sensitive food recovery opportunities this year. With little notice, organizations across Johnson County answered their doors to accept thousands of pounds of unexpected food deliveries ranging from prime sirloin (yes, really: it was going to be dumped unless we stepped in) to milk, eggs, high-protein breakfast bowls, and even gallons of muffin batter.
It is through our network of distribution partnerships that we are collectively building a more just and less wasteful food
T2T and New Life Ministries staff distribute part of those pallets of fruit at a free produce stand at New Life Ministries.
system. Together, we show love for our neighbors through food, recognizing that food is a building block of community and connection. We want a community where nutritious, desirable, and culturally-meaningful food is accessible to all. We hope you will join us in making this vision a reality.
Nicki Ross Executive Director
In addition to our partnerships, we couldn’t have accomplished what we did in 2023 without our dedicated Board of Directors and staff and AmeriCorps team.
FY23 Board of Directors
David Frisvold, Chair
Kaily Hoard, Vice-Chair
Brad Berentson, Treasurer
Andrew Coghill-Behrends, Secretary
Laura Burkamper
Amelia DeRynck
Christy Fehlberg
Todd Gibson
Molly Johnson
Mary Kelley
Tasha Lard
Patty Meier
Rajni Vijh
Leslie Yoder
FY23 Staff Team
Nicki Ross, Executive Director
Allison Gnade, Programs & Services Manager
Ezra Schley, Program Coordinator (through July 2022); Chaim Jensen, Logistics & Relationships Coordinator (started Sept. 2022)
Jared Long, Volunteer Coordinator
Elizabeth Wagner, Operations Coordinator
Anne Langebartels, Communications & Development Coordinator
Steve Noack, Program Assistant (through Oct. 2022); Gina Hudson, Dispatcher/Driver (started Dec. 2022)
Celia Eckermann, Bookkeeper and Administrative Assistant
FY23 AmeriCorps Service Members
Alex Courtney, Data Systems Coordinator
Ngonyo Mungara, Food Rescue Specialist
Lillian Poulsen, Food Access and Equity Training Specialist
Unfortunately, an ever-increasing number of neighbors need to turn to food pantries for assistance with getting food on the table, feeling the effects of rising costs due to inflation and significantly reduced SNAP benefits. Johnson County residents visited T2T’s three largest food pantry partners nearly 180,000 times last year (North Liberty Community Pantry, CommUnity Food Bank, and Coralville Community Food Pantry). Typically, they have seen a 15% increase from year to year. In 2023, the need for food more than doubled.
We cannot sing the praises of our partner organizations enough as they are ALL providing more support than ever before. They need more food to meet the higher need, more volunteers to support programs, and more staff to manage these unprecedented changes. We know it takes creativity, flexibility, and extra time and effort to make use of all the food we bring to the door, and they maintain their efforts in spite of the circumstances. We’ve weathered this year together through the strength of our partnerships.
The T2T distribution network delivered several thousand pounds of strawberries to partners across Johnson County on 10 distribution routes in 3 days! This only works if the entire network is ready – from knowing who to call when a donation comes in to lining up volunteers to sort and distribute the food when it arrives. Our quick delivery model and motivated partners are key to our adaptable process.
More large volume donations that required adaptability:
We distributed a 1,300 pound tomato donation through partners and a free produce stand.
Protein from food supply chain partner Lineage Logistics is delivered to local pantries weekly.
3,000 pounds of squash and potatoes from local farmers was delivered to neighbors’ tables!
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 reductio
The T2T distribution network delivered several thousand pounds of strawberries to partners across Johnson County on 10 distribution routes in 3 days! This only works if the entire network is ready – from knowing who to call when a donation comes in to lining up volunteers to sort and distribute the food when it arrives. Our quick delivery model and motivated partners are key to our adaptable process.
