100K MEALS W/MEANING: Fueling Bodies, Jobs & Hope!

The Real Minneapolis serves youth and adults who are too often stigmatized, overlooked, or pushed aside by systems never built around their realities. These aren’t “cracks” — they’re structural gaps that leave people waiting, wandering, and trying to survive without a workable path forward.

Many face overlapping barriers: limited transportation, no stable family support, childcare gaps, and language-access challenges. And to further compound these challenges, Minneapolis service systems are strained by widespread housing and recovery-fraud fallout, staffing shortages, federal benefit delays, and demand that rises far faster than support can keep up.

We show up below those cracks and gaps — as a last-resort safety net — with food and care that build trust, and with consistent presence that sparks connection, change, and action. We operate in these gaps using core, proven public-health strategies: nutrition, safety, stability, and relationship. We meet people where they are because lived experience builds trust in ways theory and academia cannot.

We began in the same storm we still face today. During the pandemic, kids arrived to our youth center with no breakfast or lunch while systems looked the other way. That invisible hunger ignited our partnership with Second Harvest Heartland’s Kitchen Coalition and set us on the path to distributing 100,000 scratch-cooked meals since 2021. And since 2024 — cooking them too.

Meals With Meaning: Scratch-Cooked Stability - 100k and Counting!

Each week, we prepare 500 meals powered by circular-economy values and rescued produce. These meals are public-health interventions — stabilizing people long enough for safer choices. 

TRANSFORMATIVE RECOVERY IN ACTION: Every plate is made by community members in transformative recovery, earning paid job-training hours and reclaiming structure, dignity, and belonging.

The collective lived experience of our team including homelessness, substance abuse, incarceration and scarcity enables us to better reach new trainees, as well as serve our disinvested community members. 

Your gift directly supports:

• Paid workforce training program

• Colorful veggies, proteins, packaging and water 

Hope on the Move — Distributed With Love

Our outreach teams bring meals, water and essential supplies to transit stations, libraries, day-labor corners, and the overlooked pockets of Mpls — carrying Narcan, clothing, and case-management support.

In 2025, more than 1,100 youth crossed our path, many as young as fourteen, navigating homelessness, exploitation, addiction, or immigration fear. As SNAP, HSS, and DHS disruptions hit working families and the recovery-housing fraud fallout closes shelter doors, the need is rising fast.

Your gift directly supports:

• Outreach & crisis stabilization service and triage

• Essential supplies (first aid and harm reduction), new clothing (socks, t-shirt, hat, gloves, etc.), gently used and laundered coats

Youth, Immigrant Families & Cultural Care

We provide culturally specific youth engagement and immigrant-family support that honors the whole person — restoring connection, grounding, and possibility where systems have failed.

Your gift directly supports:

• Youth mental-health engagement and activities

• Cultural-literacy support for immigrant families

Circular Economy & Healing

We rescue food, reduce waste, support community gardens, and embed sustainability into our work because people and land heal together.

Your charitable contribution helps keep people alive long enough to have a chance at tomorrow — stabilizing whole families, restoring trust, and reactivating the humanity in people who are not only slipping through structural gaps, but are literally dying on our sidewalks.

Your gift keeps hope alive where systems fall short.