Taking The Leap

Starting your own non-profit demands more than a clear mission-steel yourself for piles of paperwork and a neverending quest for cash. Here's the way to the finish line.

- Richard Nalley

Jack Griffin, now 25, was a high-school sophomore in Atlanta when he saw a 60 Minutes broadcast on hunger in America. Dismayed, he resolved to be part of the solution, one bag of groceries at a time, by volunteering at a local food pantry. There was just one catch—he couldn’t find one. Then a thought struck him: what became of all the desperate, hungry people who couldn’t find their neighbourhood food pantry, either?

To be sure, Griffin was not the first teenager to have his conscience pricked by the plight of the disadvantaged—just the rare one who identified a need, conceived a solution and followed through on it. At the ripe age of 16, he established his all-virtual non-profit, FoodFinder. It began as a website listing a handful of area food banks, cobbled together while his parents drove him to meetings with an array of grown-up ‘experts’, who were, as Griffin remembers, “quick and eager to poke holes in my ideas”. A decade later, those hunger experts are eating crow. Today, Griffin (now full-time CEO) and his FoodFinder staff of 10 oversee the largest data bank for food assistance in history, a multitasking, nationwide resource that lists and constantly updates information on 55,000 pantries and has connected 2.3 million families to meals.

It has been an arduous journey—and one on which Griffin nearly didn’t embark. Echoing a sentiment common in the non-profit community, he says: “I just couldn’t believe something like this didn’t already exist.”