Elite Meetings Forum

I was listening to a webinar on Wednesday entitled "Portland: Greener Meetings Made Easy" (which can found here: Green Meetings Webinar) and one of the questions that came up was about food donation from events. Many meeting and event planners experience resistance to food donations from the hotel, venue, or caterer in terms of liability. Some of you may know of the Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act but if not, this law was passed by Congress in 1996 to make donation of your leftovers possible. This is the perfect law to become familiar with as it will help with the resistance you may experience.

At Spring 2008 Elite Meetings Alliance, we were lucky enough to pair with Angel Harvest to donate our leftovers. With the upcoming Elite Meetings Alliance at The Broadmoor in May, we were ecstatic to hear that they already had a food donation process in place! There are many organizations that you can donate to, some even come pick up the food for you. Doing some Google searches can help you locate opportunities in the area of your event. Feeding America is a great resource to use for local food banks. Be sure to do some research on the details of how the food needs to be presented and if there are any forms to fill out in advance. Keep open lines of communication with the event venue and the organization you wish to donate to.

I encourage everyone to find such an organization to pair with for food donation: it is green and it does good for the local community (and as much as I want to pack things in Tupperware for a midnight snack, I feel better when midnight rolls around knowing that many people in the community went to bed with full stomachs that night). It's always nice to leave a place better than when you came!

Signing off...
-A