Nathalie Molina Niño’s column Bold Builders features “impact entrepreneurs building things that matter.” This is the first piece in her series.

Jasmine Crowe is the CEO of Goodr, a waste management and hunger company that redirects surplus food from businesses to nonprofits that can share it with those who are food insecure.

Jasmine is one of those leaders who is an entrepreneur because she just can’t help but be one. For people like Jasmine, when she sees a problem, she immediately starts thinking about how to solve it. Jasmine began hosting formal pop-up dinners for the homeless in Atlanta in 2013, and it took years before her efforts – to her surprise – went viral in 2016. People kept asking her which restaurants were donating the food. The answer was none – she was taking volunteer donations and, in some cases, spending her own money to make these dinners happen. Her early iterations led her to the realization that hunger is not a scarcity problem, it’s a logistics issue. So Goodr was born: an app that allows clients to monetize surplus packaged food before it expires, while also giving transportation companies extra revenue on otherwise empty cargo loads. Her ingenuity and ability to build a bridge to users who are usually ignored are unparalleled. And we’ll need Jasmine and leaders like her to solve some of the most urgent issues of our time.

Jasmine Crowe; Photo courtesy of Goodr