This month the Awesome Foundation Los Angeles funded an proposal from within! The idea that came from our group of trustees and got put into action this month is a food sharing project called Share Shelf.

We built 25 small square shelves that fasten (without doing harm) to parking-sign posts or bus-stop sign posts. The shelves have bumper stickers on them with instructions on how to share your leftovers that say:

FULL? SHARE YOUR LEFTOVERS!

HUNGRY? HELP YOURSELF.

The shelves are located all around the city near restaurants that serve big portions that are in areas with heavy foot traffic and that have a high volume of homelessness. The shelves are not TOO near restaurants to prevent loitering near entrances.This is because we want the shelves to be a positive thing for the whole community, including dining establishments!

The idea being that if you eat at a restaurant and find that you have food leftover, instead of wasting it and throwing it out, why not put it on a share shelf so someone hungry can enjoy what is left? Kind of like “take a penny, leave a penny” but with food.

GOOD Magazine posted about it, Sharable did as well, Rainn Wilson tweeted about it and the idea is spreading and moving cities already(!) , because some industrious and super cool people in San Francisco created Share Shelf SF! And they made quick work of it, creating their shelves only a week after the LA shelves were installed!

You can read more about Share Shelf here: shareshelfLA.tumblr.com where you can also find a map of all the shelves in the city from Downtown to Venice and various neighborhoods in between.

You can post images on instagram and “share your share” by hashtagging #shareshelfLA

\