Stories

Using technology to feed the hungry

JPMorganChase technologists, working with U.S. Hunger, are finding ways to fight food insecurity, both with free meals and with deep analysis of the underlying causes of hunger. Here's a look at some of their efforts.

May 28, 2025

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Working with US Hunger

Take a look at how JPMorganChase's programmers and technologists are helping to fight hunger across America.

VO: “I live with my father who is disabled and  I’m out of work.”

VO: “The kids eat every meal, but more times than not, at least one adult doesn’t eat.”

EZEKIEL BROOKS : “Feeding five growing children has been tough.”

RICK WHITTED:  U.S. Hunger is a food organization, but it's really not about food at all.

RICK WHITTED:  When we started hearing the stories, everything changed.

EZEKIEL BROOKS:   This year, we're feeding almost 19 million people.

EZEKIEL BROOKS:    But feeding people indefinitely is not the solution.

EZEKIEL BROOKS  And so we decided, we need to figure out why are they hungry in the first place?  

RICK WHITTED: So we created a simple survey. The last question was, “Why are you coming to us?"

RICK WHITTED Having a large set of data in the form of stories, we really had a seismic shift.

RICK WHITTED: We evolved from "how do we get food into the community?" to "why do we have to get food into the community?"

RICK WHITTED:   Our mission is to understand the data.    

EZEKIEL BROOKS:  This is where JPMorganChase came in to help us.

DHANASHRI PITALE:   We have been working with U.S. Hunger for years through Tech for Social Good.

DHANASHRI PITALE:  The mission of Tech for Social Good is to drive impact in our communities through the skillset of our tech workforce.

DHANASHRI PITALE:  We have programs where we pair highly skilled JPMorganChase technologists with  nonprofit organizations around the world to solve a problem that they are facing.

DHANASHRI PITALE:  When U.S. Hunger came to us they had literally a gold mine of data, and they really did not know where to start.

DHANASHRI PITALE: We help them take those next steps.

EZEKIEL BROOKS: Year number one, we had hundreds of thousands of applications coming in.

EZEKIEL BROOKS: JPMorganChase helped us with machine learning to classify all of the applications from high, medium to low urgency.

RICK WHITTED:  The second project we graduated to AI, beginning to turn the data we'd sorted into data analytics.

EZEKIEL BROOKS: The data tells us that there’s a whole universe of things beyond food that are actually the root of the problem.

RICK WHITTED:  Things like housing, and transportation, utilities, access to health care. Those are really the driving forces.

STEVE JANSEN: During our Global Technology  Senior Leaders Conference I was part of a group of around 50 MDs that had an ideation workshop with U.S. Hunger. 

STEVE JANSEN: So I was very excited to be able to sponsor one of the ideas coming out of that.

RICK WHITTED:   We walked away with a real, clear strategy on how to apply the technology in the most impactful way.

STEVE JANSEN: In many cases they can tailor a more targeted pitch to a potential corporate donor. Create insights with potential partners.

Or they can help inspire individual donors.

RICK WHITTED: So that next step for us it’s connecting to community based organizations in  housing, education, employment, healthcare support who actually do have the solution.

RICK WHITTED: There’s no way we could’ve gotten this far without JPMorganChase.

EZEKIEL BROOKS:  With this data and technology, the use cases are virtually infinite.

RICK WHITTED:  It's not data. It's a grandmother being a mom again. It's a veteran who just adopted two foster kids.

RICK WHITTED:  It's a life. And the work we do enshrines the life through good technology.

RICK WHITTED: Will we end hunger? I don’t know. But will we improve and uplift the lived experience? Absolutely.

Every night, millions of people in America go to bed hungry.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting food insecurity in the US, about one in seven American households—or approximately 47 million people—experience food insecurity. One of the groups fighting that problem is U.S. Hunger, a Florida-based nonprofit that delivers food boxes to people in some of the most hard-hit areas in the United States. To date, it has provided over 155 million meals to people in the U.S., and this year, it is on track to feed almost 19 million people.

Over the years, U.S. Hunger has partnered with Tech for Social Good (TFSG), a JPMorganChase program driving impact in the community through the skills of its tech workforce. Partnering with U.S. Hunger, through machine learning and AI applications, TFSG volunteers helped U.S. Hunger to better classify the needs of the communities where it works and begin addressing the underlying causes of food insecurity.

In 2024, representatives from U.S. Hunger attended JPMorganChase’s Global Technology Senior Leadership Conference, where they worked with over fifty Managing Directors (MDs). Together, they developed a better understanding of how U.S. Hunger can leverage its data to engage individual donors. Under the guidance of the MDs, a team of JPMorganChase data scientists developed an AI-powered donor engagement system that will help U.S. Hunger connect individual donors to those most in need.

With this help, U.S. Hunger hopes to engage some of the larger challenges in the communities where it works—issues like housing, education, employment, and healthcare. Partnering with groups that are working to overcome these hurdles, they hope to address some of those underlying issues—and, in the process, work towards a future in which nobody goes to bed hungry.

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