FAMILY-TO-FAMILY, INC.

Family-to-Family, Inc. is a grassroots nonprofit 501(c)(3) hunger and poverty relief organization dedicated to providing food, personal hygiene products and other basic life essentials to American families struggling with the challenges of poverty.

By connecting donors one-to-one with specific families in need, Family-to-Family’s mission is to bring a large and seemingly intractable problem – poverty – into personal focus, making proactive, attainable results possible…one family at a time.

In the fall of 2002, The New York Times ran a series of articles on poverty in the U.S. One article (The New York Times, September 29, 2002) described the town of Pembroke, Illinois, a community so poor many families lived in rusted out mobile homes or dilapidated houses – running water a luxury. Pam Koner, a New York mom, entrepreneur and Marvin Koner's daughter, read that article and felt compelled to help.  

Ms. Koner contacted an outreach worker in Pembroke with the simple idea of linking families with “more” in her community to families with profoundly less asking each donor family to provide a week's worth of groceries the last week of the month for their new "family." Ms. Koner was given the names of seventeen of the neediest Pembroke families. She then convinced sixteen friends and neighbors to join her, and they each began sending monthly boxes of food (and letters) to "their new" Pembroke families. Seventeen families in need soon grew to sixty in Pembroke, IL., and Ms. Koner began to identify other equally impoverished towns like Pembroke in some of our poorest states. The sixty  soon became 200 families in 10 new communities. Today Family-to-Family works in 36 communities just like Pembroke connecting over 1200 recipient and donor families.

Along the way, this unique model has morphed to include a constellation of ways families can give back in hands​-​on concrete ways, focusing on providing powerful empathy building experiences for all.

Marvin Koner's posthumous support of his daughter's work will enable Family-to-Family to continue to reach the lost and forgotten pockets of poverty here in the U.S.A.

To learn more about Family-to-Family, please visit Family-to-Family.org.