Urban Gleaners Seek to Strengthen Local Food Security| Civil Eats

“The motive was to provide nutritious food to kids and their families experiencing food insecurity,” said Haris Kuljancic, executive director of Urban Gleaners. “Our goal was to bring the food directly to their community.”

Today, the rising cost of food is a major factor contributing to food insecurity in Portland, Kuljancic said. The cost of groceries has risen 29 percent since 2020, and 53 percent of Americans cite grocery expenses as a significant source of stress.

The pandemic was a turning point for Urban Gleaners. Since its founding, the organization had distributed gleaned foods to free-food markets, but in 2020, many of their partners did not have the capacity to run the markets, as their own resources were stretched thin. Urban Gleaners stepped up to take over the markets with their own staff and volunteers.

The Lents Parks Free Food Market in Portland is held every Thursday, serving over 100 households. The market distributes prepared meals, fresh produce, shelf-stable goods, breads, dairy, and desserts. (Photo credit: Alec Boehm)

Set up in schools, city parks, community centers, and low-income housing complexes, these farmers’-market-style venues allow people to choose from a selection of gleaned food items, which might include collard greens, grapes, milk, meat, or even garlic bread. Occasionally fresh flowers are available, too, “to share some extra joy,” Hill said. Since 2024, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has made 200 transit passes available to those who need help reaching the markets.

Five years after the launch of the free markets, supply chain issues continue to disrupt the globalized food system, and U.S. tariffs on imported goods, plus cuts to federal food assistance, have put healthy food out of reach for many. In the past two years, Urban Gleaners has noticed a 25 percent increase in participation at free-food markets.

There’s another factor involved, too: “SNAP has become more difficult to access,” Hill said. “There’s a demographic of people who make just enough money not to be able to access it, and sometimes they’re struggling the most.”

Understanding this, the organization has a “no-questions-asked” policy—unlike at some food pantries, they do not require proof of income or forms of identification.

In Southern California, Food Forward Scales Up

“A lot of our relationships in the old days used to just be with some well-meaning individual who worked on the docks,” said Rick Nahmias, Food Forward’s founder and CEO. “Now we’re working with CEOs and chief sustainability officers because Big Produce understands food loss of any kind is not good for anyone. They understand the environmental impact, the economic impact, and they all want their food to end up on the table of someone.”

With the help of volunteers, Food Forward also continues to glean in a more traditional, small-scale way through their backyard harvest and farmers’ market programs. While gleaning at the farmers’ markets, volunteers collect and redistribute unsold produce that, in some cases, would otherwise be composted. They also work with the folks running market stands to file tax documents for the donations.

The organization has changed significantly since Civil Eats featured it in 2019. “That year—2019 into 2020—that was the tipping point for the organization,” Nahmias said. The organization opened an 8,000-square-foot warehouse facility called the Produce Pit Stop just months before COVID reached L.A., which expanded access to refrigeration and loading docks and proved vital in addressing the sudden spike in local food insecurity.

With the help of the new facility, Food Forward has grown rapidly over the last five years and now supplies food to people in L.A. County, 12 adjacent counties, and six adjacent states, including tribal lands. At this time, Food Forward recovers and distributes enough fresh produce to feed a quarter of a million people every day of the week.

As of September 2025, the organization had recovered more than 500 million pounds of food, an achievement that was formally recognized by the L.A. City Council.

“The irony of California, especially the Los Angeles area, is that we have more food flow through this region than any place else on the continent,” Nahmias said. “At the same time, we have 25 percent of our households experiencing food insecurity. What is wrong with this picture? It was shameful five years ago, and it’s shameful now.”

Making gleaned food accessible to all members of a community has always been challenging, but recent ICE raids have created further complications, Nahmias said. “People are afraid to show up for distributions.”

As a result, the team has begun to occasionally distribute food in unmarked areas to people in need. “Whatever it takes, we’re there to support them, and we will continue to do so.”

In the Midwest, Culturally Diverse Foods From Second Harvest Heartland

“Farming is a big part of the community here, and being able to have partners in that realm is vital to our work and our mission,” said Zach Nugent, senior media relations manager at Second Harvest, which was founded in 1971 and is based in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. “Many people think of food banks as giving out canned goods and government cheese, but that’s really changed over the years.” Produce and proteins are the two most requested types of foods.

The Twin Cities metro area is home to large East African and Hmong populations and growing Korean and Vietnamese populations, Nugent said. “We’re able to work with growers who specialize in the types of produce that those neighbors really seek out.”

Second Harvest sources 21 varieties of produce they identify as “culturally connected”—ingredients that are “traditionally asked for by different communities throughout our region,” such as rare peppers, Nugent said. As a practice and priority, sourcing these specialty items is “something that came into focus early on during the pandemic.”