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.

What also stuck with me was how much good food was going in the trash a few blocks away. Bakeries closing with full racks. Restaurants tossing trays that were never touched. None of it was anyone being careless — there was just no simple way to get it from the people who had extra to the people who needed it, before it spoiled.

One of the people I got to know there turned out to be from Margarita, the island off the coast of Venezuela that half my family comes from. My grandfather sailed from there to the U.S. at seventeen and left his family behind. I've never been able to visit, so meeting someone from home, here, in the town I grew up in, made this feel less like volunteering and more like something I owed.

So I built Second Table for the DMV: a way for any business with surplus food to hand it to a shelter or pantry nearby, in a few minutes, for free. Every business and organization that takes part is named on our homepage — if you're feeding people in this community, everyone who visits should know it.