Hannah Dehradunwala

In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

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Hannah Dehradunwala,
Transfernation co-founder

Solving Hunger Now

1. City of residence: NYC

2. Place of birth: Silver Spring, Maryland

3. In under five sentences, define your nonprofit: The easiest way to describe it would be ‘Uber for extra food’. Transfernation is an on-demand food donation system built for cities. Using our app, food donors can connect with our Transporters instantly to request pickups for their extra, untouched food. Our Transporters take this food to the closest homeless shelter or soup kitchen, usually less than a mile away.  

4. What social or environmental impact is your business/nonprofit making? In the last two years, Transfernation has redistributed over 250,000 pounds of untouched food, translating to over 210,000 meals. All this food has been redirected from landfill and towards individuals and families facing food insecurity.

5. What is the best part about your job and the work you’re doing with Transfernation? Why? I get to build a system that doesn’t exist. It’s crazy that almost everything is on-demand these days; you can request rides, get shelves put up in your house, hire a dog walker, but when it comes to something as basic as wanting to donate food, suddenly you’ve hit a wall. No service exists that can pick up food donations for perishable food on-demand because there aren’t any existing rescue organizations that can reach it fast enough. Cities already have the necessary infrastructure to build an on-demand food donation system and it’s been an absolute rush figuring out how it’s going to work because there are so many ways it can. And we didn’t need to build anything new to do it.

6. What book(s) are you currently reading? I just finished “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan and now I’m reading “Family Matters” by Rohinton Mistry

7. Quote you (try to) live by? “In the end, only three things matter: How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

8. Using one word, how would you describe yourself? Adaptable