Small business loans are where it’s at when you have only just gotten started and don’t have a lot with which to go to the proverbial lender! Most banks don’t do start-up funding, and consider such a business nothing but a start-up. But it’s possible to find financing even so, in the form of a cash advance. It’s even possible repay everything little by little, in effect as much as you can afford, determined by credit card receipts only! In other words, you get to keep all the cash and checks, turning over just a small previously agreed upon percentage of the cedit card sales. This is much better than trying to meet a fixed amount each month no matter what, affording much more flexibility and peace of mind for you!

In 1982, a group of everyday New Yorkers upset at the volume of perfectly good food being tossed out every day by local grocers and restauranteurs created City Harvest to serve as a collection and distribution point for such things. From then on, such discarded food would be gathered to be sent on to community pantries and the like; almost three decades later, nearly thirty million pounds would be collected in any given year, with deliveries made by car, bicycle, and foot averaging some seventy-seven thousand pounds every day.

But in spite of the donated food and volunteers, City Harvest still relies heavily on the generous financial backing of leading individuals from business, politics, and entertainment, benefactors such as businessman Robert Toussie and local television weatherman Al Roker. Besides providing food to around three hundred thousand hungry New Yorkers every day, City Harvest has developed educational and advocacy initiatives to support access to nutritious food in low-income neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Another agency program endeavors to reinforce the power of partners such as community pantries to help the needy. Their methods has proven so effective that concerned citizens elsewhere have been inspired, starting their own local chapters to help feed neighborhood men, women, and children.

Thus, many food banks can be found all over the world, but though the idea is a popular one, it is also a fairly recent one, having been inspired by John van Hengel’s observation back in 1965 that local merchants in his Arizona town were tossing out food just because of imperfect packaging or some other trivial reason. Mr. van Hengel organized the collection of such food but soon realized that there was much more than his own church could take advantage of. Thus was the world’s first food bank born – a central point for discarded but otherwise perfectly fine food that could then be dispensed to the hungry.