AmpleHarvest founder speaks in Bozeman

Feeding the hungry

Gary Oppenheimer, founder of an organization that connects local growers and gardeners with area food banks in order to help provide hungry families with fresh food, will speak at Montana State University from 3:30-5 p.m. Friday, May 20, in the Procrastinator Theater. Oppenheimer will speak on “The Power of One: The story of how an aging geek changed the American food bank network.”

The organization Oppenheimer founded, AmpleHarvest.org, connects local growers and gardeners with area food banks to help prevent food waste by donating excess produce to provide hungry families with fresh food.

Oppenheimer is a highly lauded pioneer in the area of food waste reduction. He has won numerous awards for his work, including being named a CNN Hero, a Points of Light Tribute winner, Huffington Post’s “Greatest Person of the Day” and “2011 Game Changer,” a 2013 Purpose Prize fellow, a Russell Berrie Foundation “Making A Difference” award winner and many others. He has also earned master gardener status and is a Rutgers University Environmental Steward, a World Food Prize nominee, a TED Talk speaker and an environmental commissioner in northern New Jersey, where he currently resides.

“The Power of One” talk will focus on addressing food waste by fixing what Oppenheimer, founder of Ample Harvest, calls a hole in America’s food bank network by looking at how one person with an idea and a passion can make changes that ripple across the world.

Oppenheimer’s talk is sponsored by the MSU College of Education, Health and Human Development, MSU’s Food Resource Council, the Montana Food Bank Network and the Gallatin Valley Food Bank.

For more information about Oppenheimer and Ample Harvest, contact Anna Diffenderfer at (406) 994-4074 oranna.diffenderfer@montana.edu.

For more information on Oppenheimer and AmpleHarvest.org, visitwww.ampleharvest.org.