Help us do our bit by driving away Bay Area’s food insecurity
Lunch Bag Initiative is a non profit based in San Jose, CA. We make lunch bags for the homeless, every week since 2013. Our lunch bags consist of a PBJ Sandwich and a granola bar or fruit. We have partnered with various local shelters and charities, and are currently serving 900+ meals a week!
In California, over 5 million people are struggling with hunger – and of them 1,731,270 are children. After the Covid-19 pandemic, many people like you and I have been forced into the cycle of homelessness and are going hungry to bed. Food is a human right! These unfortunate people are roaming the streets in search of food and shelter and are struggling every day. Help us put a smile on their face by donating to this cause! We donate a humble lunch bag consisting of a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich and seasonal fruits/granola bars, in large quantities every week. We also donate hygiene supplies, toiletries, socks, underwear, warm clothes and blankets as part of our initiative.
What do we do?
We make PB&J sandwiches for the homeless in downtown San Jose. We contribute to several charities every week, helping shelters, and temporary homes that house the homeless. These underprivileged are mostly recovering drug addicts, low-income families, transitional shelter families, and mentally disabled people. Every week, we gather together and with the contributions of our community managed to make around 600+ lunch bags.
Where does your donation go?
The money will be going directly to fund these meals. Supplies to make the meals include bread, jelly, peanut butter, granola bars, fruits, bags. We don’t stop there. We also regularly donate hygiene supplies, gloves, and warm clothes/blankets to shelters in the Bay Area.
With your donations we can help our community and end hunger one PB&J sandwich at a time!
Thank you for you support! It means the world to us!
LUNCH BAG INITIATIVE : Key features
Ending world hunger.. one sandwich at a time!
Started in 2013
Being Immigrants, we thought poverty only exists in our part of the world. We were raised with the Hindu concept of seva(service), and always donated 10% of our income to charities in India. When we arrived in the US, we were shocked to see littered streets and hungry faces in downtown San Jose. We knew we had to do something about that! The only way to distribute food to the needy is through the homeless shelter network, so we started doing weekly service and began with only 50 lunch bags/week. Our family of 3, gathered on our kitchen counter and made the meals.
How we grew
As we started sharing what we are doing with our friends and family, our small seva program, started to snowball! It seemed like everyone wanted to help but just didn’t know how! In our local Art of living center, after our meditation practice, we were joined weekly by a team of 12-15 friends to make our meals. Soon, we were making and delivering 200 meals a week to 2 different homeless shelters.
Get Inspired
We have been inspiring many other leaders to start their own teams. There were many “spin off” teams, they asked us about logistics, where they could send their donations, and we got them in touch with the shelters. By 2017, we were doing 500+ meals every week, and donating at 4 shelters!
14,000 Meals served
Join us in surpassing last year’s milestone—let’s aim for even more this year!
Hands-On Impact
Partner with shelters like Martha’s Kitchen, HomeFirst, Life Moves, Catholic Charities and more!
Or Simply Donate
We have a gofundme campaign, QR code to scan below :
https://www.gofundme.com/f/ending-hunger-one-sandwich-at-a-time