Our local volunteers pick-up excess healthy food from local food donors and deliver it directly to local social service agencies that feed the food insecure.
Food Rescue US was founded in Fairfield County in 2011 when our founders, Jeff Schacher and Kevin Mullins, recognized that two growing challenges facing their community and the nation, food insecurity and food waste, could be solved with innovative technology, volunteers, and a direct-transfer model. Together, they founded Community Plates and created a unique model of food rescue that is simple, sustainable, and scalable. The organization quickly received vast support from volunteer rescuers, food donors, and social service agencies, and by 2014, the organization had rescued more than 6 million meals and was serving not only Fairfield County but also Albuquerque and Columbus.
In the following years, we continued to expand in order to meet the needs of more communities. In 2017, the organization changed its name to Food Rescue US in recognition of our expanding national presence and simultaneously launched a new version of our app, which we continue to upgrade.
Since our founding, we have provided 166 million meals and kept 199 million pounds of excess food out of landfills. Food Rescue US is now in 39 locations and constantly growing.
Since 2014, Operation Safe Escape has been working with survivors of domestic violence, stalking, and harassment to help them find safety and freedom.
Operation Safe Escape is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, founded in 2016 with a single goal: to make sure that every person impacted by domestic violence has the resources, information, and confidence that they need to leave their abuser and stay safe once they do. We are an organization of security and safety professionals, volunteering our time and expertise to help people stay safe and live their best lives. And we do it all for free. We don’t change you to help you protect yourselves or your clients. We don’t change the people that come to us for help. We don’t make a profit, we’re just here because we want to help. We have experts in computer and mobile device security, forensics, physical security, tech support, OPSEC, OSINT, and online privacy.
We’ve participated in over 3,000 successful escapes, and we’re a trauma informed / survivor-centric organization. Every one of our volunteers have thorough background checks; safety and trust is paramount to us. We have over 100 volunteers with backgrounds in law enforcement, military, technology, advocacy, and other relevant skills that we can provide to your organization. No matter how skilled or knowledgeable the abuser or stalker is, we’re stronger when we all work together.
Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.
Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.
There are over 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide. Visit one in your area or start one yourself!
DEF CON Franklin will infuse research from the hacker community into national security and foreign policy debates. We aim to lift up groundbreaking work happening across villages and deliver this critical research to key policymakers across the globe. Furthermore, Franklin will enhance DEF CON community impact to actively promote democracy, justice, and human rights. Aside from policy work, Franklin will establish a mechanism that empowers individual members of the DEF CON community to volunteer at under-resourced organizations supporting our critical infrastructure.
Operation Hammond is an international, non-profit organization, of like-minded individuals within the anime, sci-fi, fantasy, and pop culture convention community. We are dedicated to bringing awareness of first aid, emergency preparedness, and training to people who attend, and staff anime, sci-fi, fantasy, and pop culture conventions. The diversity, and social dimensions of this social scene are unique. We are nerds helping nerds in times of need.
Our members, and senior staff have the equipment, experience, and know-how to effectively deal with medical emergencies, social needs, and the unique requirements of those who attend pop culture events and conventions. We are a social medical organization. This means that we are able to carry out public safety, convention first aid, and first responder duties at pop culture, fan events, and conventions at the American Red Cross First Aid level.
A worldwide volunteer system of radio hams who provide limited net.access during emergencies so that people can communicate.
A crowdsourced open environmental data project. volunteer centered. Measures airquality, radiation, and environmental health.
A crowdsourcing service which lets lets people who are visually impaired call for visual assistance from their smartphones.
volunteer effort to improve the state of Open Streetmap in places that are generally ignored by other maps because they're too far away, too rural, or otherwise unprivileged or underserved. NGOs and first responders rely on OSM during disasters. They can also rally mappers to develop datasets in specific locations at need (after disasters, usually).