A campaign by Common Table · Fort Collins, Colorado
The last hot lunch of the school year is served at 12:40 p.m. on Friday, June 6. Doors reopen Tuesday, August 19. In between there are 73 days — and for the neighbors at our tables, most of those days come with no plan for breakfast.
Common Table rescues surplus food from 38 farms, grocers and processors along the Poudre River and cooks it into real meals at 24 neighborhood sites. No sign-up, no ID, no income test, no story to tell. This campaign covers all 73 days.
JUN 7 → AUG 18 · one square = one day of meals at all 24 sites
Days fully funded
41 / 73
Hover a day to see what happens. Tap an open day to fund it — $1,100 covers 1,616 meals that day.
“We have never once asked a family to explain themselves before we served them. That is the whole policy.”
Denise Okafor · site lead, LARIAT Neighborhood Center
Why this window
Federal summer nutrition is real, but it is thin. In our five counties, a child has to travel an average of 4.1 miles to reach a federally funded summer meal site, and three of the five counties have no weekday site within two miles of a bus line. Families keep their balance in gas money, not bus fare.
So we do the opposite of the federal model: we bring the meal to a table people already walk to — a library, a rec center, a church parking lot with a grill — and we stay open the whole 73 days.
Matching gift, live right now
The Kestrel Family Fund will double every gift to this campaign until the remaining 32 days are covered — up to $35,200. They have done this four summers running; last year the match was fully claimed on June 2.
$35,200 committed · $18,440 claimed by 214 donors · $16,760 left
The arithmetic of the gap
0
days between the last school meal and the first one of the next year
0%
of the kids who eat at our school tables in May do not appear at a summer site
0 mi
average walk to the nearest federally funded summer meal site in our region
What changes on day 12
Pantry balances run out about two weeks in. Then the weekend comes.
Summer programs close at 1 p.m. Friday and reopen Tuesday. That is 68 hours with no congregate meal service at all. Our Weekend Bags — six pounds of rescued produce, bread, milk and protein, packed Thursday night by volunteers — exist because of that gap. 1,140 go out every week.
What one $60 bag actually holds
Cost to feed a family of four for the weekend: $10.00
Receipt, not adjectives
These are FY2024 audited actuals divided by FY2024 program expenses — not projections, not a grant proposal. Our cost per meal has moved two cents in four years, because we hold rescue and transport costs flat by scheduling routes against harvest calendars instead of donations.
Program ratio
0%
programs · 6% fundraising · 3% management
Operating reserve
0 mo
months of expenses held, audited annually
Per-dollar breakdown
FY2024 · Baird & Foss LLP, unqualified opinion
“$0.68” assumes rescued ingredient cost of $0 plus purchased milk, protein and staple dry goods at our co-op rate. No line item here is padded, and none is hidden in a separate “special event.”
Total =$1.00
What an amount translates to
One summer Tuesday, 5:40 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.
Follow one crate of seconds tomatoes from a field in Bellvue to a paper tray on a library lawn in Timnath. Eleven hours, four vehicles, one refrigerator that never goes above 38°F.
05:40 · Harvest · Bellvue Roots Farm
Farmers call these “seconds”: correct flavor, wrong caliper. Common Table schedules its pickups against each grower's harvest calendar, so surplus is claimed before it is plowed in. In 2024 we diverted 612,840 lbs from three counties — 41% of everything we cooked.
Driver: Rafael Salcido, route 1 · 3,100 route days without a temperature violation
07:15 · Cold chain · Front Range terminal
Two leased reefers, four loggers, one rule: product out of the danger zone in under 30 minutes. Every crate is scanned into our inventory system at pickup, which is how we can tell you a Tuesday in July weighed 2,180 lbs and became 1,640 plates.
Spoilage rate 3.1% · industry-average rescued-food spoilage 12–18%
09:30 · Kitchen · Poudre High district kitchen
The district lets us use its kitchen during summer closure in exchange for staffed pantry shifts. Our dietitians build the menu around whatever the growers bring, then publish it two weeks ahead — in English and Spanish — at every site and on the same Facebook page the kids already follow.
Menu posted 14 days out · 61% of plates are fully plant-forward
11:30 · The table · Timnath Library lawn
We count trays, not people — a deliberate choice. A site lead greets, a volunteer refills the drink bin, and the meal is on a tray in under four minutes. The rec counselor eats lunch at 1:15, after the kids leave. This is what 120 covers per hour looks like.
4 of our 7 site leads ate at these tables as kids
14:15 · Weekend bags · all 24 sites
1,140 bags go out Thursday afternoons and again Sunday when the mountain sites reopen. This is the part grant funding almost never covers, and the part our monthly donors pay for by name — the Table Keepers club, 388 members, $12 a month and up.
1,140 bags/week × 11 weeks = 12,540 bags per summer
Fiscal year 2024, audited
Every figure below appears in the same order in our annual report and on our Form 990. Where a number is an estimate, we say so in the footnote.
0
summer meals served 2024, June 7 – Aug 18
▲ 22% vs. 2023
0
lbs of surplus food rescued from 38 farms, grocers & processors
≈ 41% of menu volume
0
neighbors served across 24 sites, including 2,190 children under 18
estimate · tray counts, headcounts
0 hr
median time from farm field to a served plate, down from 19 hours in 2022
▼ 37%
8 of 24 sites · 52% of all summer plates
| Site | Community | Open | 2024 plates |
|---|---|---|---|
| LARIAT Neighborhood Center | Fort Collins | Mon–Fri 11:30 | 21,140 |
| Poudre HS community kitchen | Fort Collins | Mon–Thu 11:30 | 18,300 |
| Timnath Library lawn | Timnath | Tue & Thu 11:45 | 9,420 |
| Wellington Grange 314 | Wellington | Mon & Wed 12:00 | 8,760 |
| Cache la Poudre UMC lot | Bellvue | Fri 12:00 | 6,240 |
| Powderhouse Rec Center | Wellmouth | Wed–Sun 12:30 | 10,980 |
| Ponderosa Elementary gym | Ponderosa Park | Tue–Sat 11:45 | 7,850 |
| Rist Canyon mobile pantry | Laporte · Rustic | Thu 15:00 | 5,110 |
Fund a day. Fund a week. Fund the weekend.
Pick any open day on the calendar above and it lands here. Or choose an amount — small amounts pool, and pooling is how day 61 gets funded. Every gift is duplicated by the Kestrel Family Fund until the gap closes.
“If we don't close the gap, I will tell you on September 5 exactly which days we couldn't cover and what we did instead.” Camila Peña-Ford, executive director
Your gift to Seventy-Three Days
Estimate #SUM-25-0041
Choose an amount
Total impact of your gift
352 meals, matched to 704 — enough to keep every table open for 11 site-days.
Secure · 256-bit · you can cancel monthly gifts any time
The people who run this
“The trick is the cold chain. If lettuce hits 41 degrees it's done, and then you're explaining to a family why the salad looks sad. So I don't let it.”
Rafael Salcido · route 1 driver · 7 summers
“Summer is the only time we lose track of the kids we know best. Their teachers know who skipped breakfast in May. I just need somebody to still be cooking for them in July.”
Priya Raman · director of nutrition services, school district partner
“I was eleven, sitting at this exact table. Now I hand out the trays. The thing I tell the new volunteers is: nobody here has to earn it. Nobody.”
Jordan Vance · site lead, Timnath Library lawn
“We had 400 pounds of cabbage and no market in a Tuesday. Common Table picked it up in an hour and paid me for the fuel. That's the whole relationship — it isn't charity either way.”
Hollis Beard · Beard Family Cabbage, Wellington
Accountability
Common Table is a registered 501(c)(3), EIN 84-2910447, in our fourteenth year. Our books are audited every year by an independent firm; we have never filed a qualified opinion. Board members receive no compensation, and no board member sits on a vendor contract they benefit from.
$0M
FY2024 total expenses
$0K
summer 2024 direct program cost
0%
of spending on fundraising
0
unpaid board members, 4 from site communities
May 15
All 24 site agreements and menus signed. Two new sites confirmed.
Jun 6 — deadline
Kestrel match expires at midnight. Last school meal served 12:40 p.m.
Jun 7 — Day 1
First service at 11:30 a.m. across 24 tables.
Jul 23 — Day 47
Laporte Senior Hall opens; mountain route expands to twice weekly.
Aug 18 — Day 73
Final summer service. School kitchens reopen Aug 19.
Sep 5
Donor report: what we served, what we spent, and what we did not manage.
Other ways in
Become a Table Keeper — $12+/month
388 members cover the weekend bags, the line item grants almost never fund. 388.
Match it at work
1,340 employer programs recognize us, including three of the region's largest hospital and semiconductor employers. We'll email you the one-page form.
Stock, donor-advised funds, QCDs
Give appreciated securities and we sell at fair market value — you avoid capital gains, the whole amount reaches plates. gifts@commontable.org
Sponsor a route, or drive one
$6,400 sponsors a full summer route end to end. Volunteers are needed for Thursday packing — 90 minutes, no certification required.
Give food, pallets or cold storage
Growers and grocers: our intake team answers within four hours. We accept graded and ungraded produce, bakery, dairy and protein.
Straight answers
No. Not an application, not an ID, not a residency check, not a reason. This is how USDA At-Mode and CACFP congregate service works for youth 18 and under, and we apply the same rule to everyone. We count trays, not people, which means we cannot tell you exactly how many individuals walked up — and we consider that a feature.
Overage goes to the September gap — the two weeks before school meals restart, which have no federal funding at all. We report overage and its destination in the September 5 donor report rather than moving it silently into the general fund.
Total summer program expenses (ingredient purchases, kitchen labor, transport fuel and refrigeration, site staffing, translation, consumables) divided by meals served. Rescued food is carried at $0 ingredient cost but every cost of moving and cooking it is included. The Kestrel-funded pilot in 2023 that used only purchased food came to $1.34, which is the number most food banks will quote you.
Our two part-time registered dietitians, with a standing advisory group of six site users — two parents, two youth, two older adults — who review each month's plan and can reject it. Halal and vegetarian options are served at every site every day, not on request.
No. Donors receive a receipt, one mid-summer update, and the September report. We do not rent, trade or append our list, and we cap monthly donors at four emails a year. Unsubscribe in one click, no phone call required.
Dinner. We serve one meal plus a grocery bag, and we do not have the capacity for a second congregate service. We also don't reach the roughly 40% of families in the two western counties who told our 2024 survey they don't trust institutions enough to walk up to a public food table — a trust problem we're spending two years on with partner clinics, not a logistics problem a donation fixes this summer.
Day 42 of 73 is funded. Day 43 is not.
$1,100 keeps every table in five counties open for one day of this summer — 1,616 meals, matched to 3,232. Or give what you have: $25 pools with others and shows up in the same September report.
$45,100 raised · $35,200 to go · match ends Jun 6
Donate to Seventy-Three DaysCommon Table · EIN 84-2910447 · gifts are tax-deductible
Seventy-Three Days · 32 left
$120 = 352 meals, doubled by match