Why I built Second Table.

Hey, I'm Drew Jimenez, a senior at Georgetown Preparatory School in Rockville, Maryland. For a while now I've been volunteering at Bethesda Cares, and the thing that stuck with me wasn't any one shift — it was going back week after week and recognizing faces. People I passed on the same streets I walk every day.

I was struck by how much food Bethesda Cares provides to people in our community — and how much more is needed. At the same time, I knew that restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores often have perfectly good food left over. It frustrated me that so much food could go to waste while organizations like Bethesda Cares needed more of it. The problem was finding a simple way to connect businesses with extra food to organizations that could put it to good use before it spoiled.

One of the people I got to know there turned out to be from Margarita, an island off the coast of Venezuela that half my family comes from. My grandfather sailed from there to the U.S. at seventeen, leaving his family behind. I've never been able to visit, so meeting someone from the same island my grandfather had left so many years ago, right here in the town I grew up in, made this community feel even more personal to me. I wanted to do more to help.

That's why I created Second Table, a free platform that connects local businesses with surplus food to nearby shelters and food pantries that can put it to good use. Every participating business and organization is recognized on our homepage — if you're helping feed people in this community, everyone who visits should know it.