Penny Experiment

Each time that I sit down to write an article, I never really know how it will turn out or whether it will be published. That sense of unknowing always takes me back to junior high school when I was always convinced that my papers just wouldn’t measure up to expectation. So far, I have been fortunate and almost every article I submitted here has been accepted (with the sole exception being an article I wrote about sex and money which, as Jeffrey explained it to me, was just too boring — a comment that troubled me for about six months after he shared it with me!)

As I write the column that I hope you are now reading, I hope that I have not found a second topic that Jeffrey will reject. That topic is Jeffrey himself.

Although we have never met in person, I’ve gotten to know Jeffrey over the past couple of years. He is a good fellow, full of ideas and has high ideals. More importantly, he takes his ideas and he executes them. As an example, he has taken his desire to be a force for positive change and turned it into Penny Experiment. Penny Experiment is an attempt to turn a found penny on the ground into $1 million worth of food for food banks. So far, Penny Experiment has turned a single penny into over $18,000 in donated food, through a combination of Jeffrey’s initiative and the efforts of the many people who have donated their time and their talent to the project.

I encourage you to visit the Penny Experiment website to learn more about Jeffrey’s effort to feed the hungry, and to learn more about ways in which you can contribute. There are many ways that you can get involved that can also help you save money yourself. Jeffrey recently spend 100 days eating well on less than $1 a day to show how he was able to get food for food banks for pennies on the dollar. He is currently writing a series on how you can use this strategy to save money on your own groceries and donate the extras you get for free to your local food bank (like many others have already done) to add to Penny Experiment donation totals.

The Penny Experiment is a wonderful example of how the simplest of ideas, coupled with vision and initiative, can give rise to great things. Even if Penny Experiment were to end today, it has already delivered a lot of meals to food banks in the USA. Whatever your reasons may be for getting involved, I encourage you to do so.

Have you ever contributed to a food bank? Has a food bank ever come to your assistance when you have needed it? Do you ever throw away food that you have allowed to expire or do you find a way to ensure that you are not wasting it?