Niveda Mahesh, a student at Woodbridge Senior High School, is working to reduce both community hunger and greenhouse gas emissions by tackling food waste in her area.
The senior has been working philanthropically since 2017, when she founded 4Girls 4Change, a nonprofit dedicated to “generating long-term, sustainable change.”
Since forming the organization, Mahesh and her sister and cousins have raised over $20,000 for charitable groups in their neighborhoods, collecting donations and fundraising for organizations like StreetLight Community Ministries Outreach and Food for Others.
Now, the group is working to keep leftover food out of landfills, with the help of a $10,000 grant from the National Society of High School Scholars’ Be More Fund.
Titled “Reducing Food Wastage in Local Restaurants,” the project was originally for Mahesh’s Girl Scout Gold Award. Her idea was to help restaurants easily donate leftover food at the end of the night.
Donating excess food, she says, is a way to simultaneously feed those in need and keep food out of landfills, where it can turn into harmful greenhouse gas. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, municipal solid waste in 2020 accounted for the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the U.S., or 15 percent of those emissions.
When food waste sits in landfills, it emits methane gas, which is 25 times more potent at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, the EPA says.
“I realized that if this food was getting redirected to the homeless, more than just the homeless people getting food, it’s actually reducing the amount of methane gas emissions going into the atmosphere,” Mahesh says. “So the overall impact goes around a lot of different areas, which is why I love this field. It’s so interdisciplinary.”
While many restaurants have plenty of leftovers and may want to donate them, Mahesh says that the startup costs of donations (for supplies such as donation trays or extra freezers), as well as the training time to learn how to store and transport the food, can keep restaurants from doing so.
For her Girl Scout project, Mahesh partnered with the Dale City McDonald’s, StreetLight, and Food Donation Connection, which runs the pickups and drop-offs between restaurants and food drives. For eight weeks, she helped the three groups coordinate weekly donations, and at the end, they had successfully implemented a system that she says would work long term.
With that success under her belt, she competed in NSHSS’ Be More-a-Thon and presented a proposal to implement a similar model at 10 local mom-and-pop restaurants.
The proposal was chosen as one of 10 winners, and 4Girls 4Change will soon begin using the grant funds to provide restaurants with the startup costs and other support needed to save even more food.
Feature photo courtesy Niveda Mahesh
This story originally ran in Northern Virginia Magazine’s April issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.
