Community Means Helping People You Don’t Even Know

Salesforce Community Groups across Texas came together on October 1st to help provide food for families in need in their local communities. In San Antonio, Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth, with the help of local food banks, dozens of Trailblazers joined forces for the first annual #MealsOverTexas. And Mogli was right there to lend a helping hand, with Travis Crandon helping in Dallas/Fort Worth and Eric Dreshfield helping in San Antonio. And in addition to that, Mogli made a cash donation to each of the three Texas food banks.

What’s The Why?

Helping others has always been a part of Mogli. Mogli SMS was born out of work our founder was doing in Western Kenya in 2012 with a micro-finance and agriculture program. The challenge to be solved: how do you connect with 5,000 Kenyan farmers and their families over a broad geographic region? The solution: with a simple text message. Despite living in a mud hut, having no running water and limited access to electricity, each farmer had a flip phone. From that moment forward, Mogli has worked tenaciously to help US and global non profits, education organizations and a growing base of commercial organizations use text messaging to engage their stakeholders. 

San Antonio 

Pre-Covid, the San Antonio Food Bank was serving 60,000 families per year. At the peak of Covid, that more than doubled to over 120,000 families. On October 1st, during #MealsOverTexas, sixteen Trailblazers came together to provide 135 families with a two week supply of food. More than 20,000 pounds of food was organized and loaded onto carts, then delivered to and packed inside the vehicles of families in need, all over the course of about 3 hours. It was quite the operation to behold, with forklift trucks moving pallets of food, staged in the production area where the carts were loaded up, and wheeled out to the distribution area, to wait for the families to arrive at their scheduled pick up times.

Dallas/Fort Worth

The Tarrant Area Food Bank serves thirteen counties in North Texas, providing 1,000,000 meals a week! In addition to making sure families in need get food, they also run programs that teach people to cook, grow fresh produce in a community garden, and provide enhanced access to fresh food through a Farmers Market. On October 1st, the #MealsOverTexas team of nine Trailblazers provided over 11,000 meals to families served by the Tarrant Area Food Bank.

Houston

The Houston Food Bank is America’s largest food bank by distribution, serving people in eighteen southeast Texas counties by providing over 150,000,000 meals annually. In addition to providing food for those in need, the Houston Food Bank also provides assistance in applying to state-funded social and health services to those who need it, meals to children in after-school and summer programs, nutritional education classes and more. On October 1st, the #MealsOverTexas team of eighteen Trailblazers worked tirelessly to box up thousands of pounds of food, loading them onto pallets so they are ready for distribution to local families in need.

Austin

Brighter Bites has delivered more than 40,000,000 pounds of fresh produce and millions of nutrition education materials to over 475,000 individuals (including teachers) in multiple cities across the U.S. Their mission is accomplished using a simple three-step process.

1. Fill the Plate: Bring fresh produce to where children already are - preschools, elementary schools and summer camps. Every week Brighter Bites in Austin delivers approximately 50 servings of fresh, seasonal produce to nearly 200 families at Sanchez Elementary School. 
2.  Educate: At the school, Brighter Bites representatives teach parents, children and teachers how to make the most out of their produce, by encouraging teachers to utilize their own produce as teaching aids during classes. By doing do, they not only target increasing food access in their local communities, but also food literacy.
3.  Make it Great: Brighter Bites helps schools and teachers create a fun food experience for everyone involved by demonstrating colorful recipes, passing out samples and showing off just how good food can really taste when it's paired with creativity, a happy environment, passionate staff and even a few stickers!

Why Food?

We all need food to survive. The Covid pandemic has made it more difficult for some families to get access to the food they need.  Mogli has been working with food banks across the nation for quite some time, helping them stay connected with donors, volunteers and staff through simple 1-to-1 chats, bulk messages and survey functionality, all done via text messaging. We are so proud that we can enable the great work of so many caring organizations with powerful tools to connect people for good.

In fact, that kind of work is where the Mogli name came from: MObile GLobal Impact. Want to help people in your local community? Visit Feeding America to find your local food bank.

Want to learn more about how MogliSMS can help your organization? Visit mogli.com today!