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Minga
food & climate

A participatory model to

What we want to solve

Foodwaste globally

FAO estimates that 1/3rd of food goes to waste, emitting 6 % of global GHG. At the same time, Covid-19 has increased hunger and malnutrition.

1/3rd
of food goes to waste

If global foodwaste was a country, it would be the world’s third-biggest polluter. If organic waste is not adequately composted, it generates highly polluting methane gas in the landfill.

A woman disposing of food

Situation in Chile

Only during the first months and only in Chile, Covid-19 has already left an estimated 2.5 million people unemployed.

That means a critical situation for 2.5 million families.

~38% of Chilean families

Even Chile's so-called middle-class, which was doing well "on paper" but is highly indebted, is in danger of drifting into precarious conditions.

The latest amendments to the Chilean anti-foodwaste legislation, approved by the Senate at the beginning of August and now waiting to pass in Congress, is still in danger of being rejected, and supermarkets keep destroying tons of food shortly before its expiry date.

How Minga helps

  • We built a free-to-use mobile app and cloud platform that rewards people for their climate- and community-friendly action.
    Users can discover food offerings, help to prepare food, or do other voluntary work, whereas individuals and businesses can donate food and goods.
  • All participants earn impact points for their donations and voluntary work. These points can be either claimed by the person or donated to others who might not have the chance to contribute.
  • Minga reflects the ancient tradition of exchange in a non-monetary system but adapted to today’s reality.
  • Minga starts in Chile, but can be easily deployed to other countries all around the world.

Features

Help and Benefit

Help with your voluntary work – collect, prepare, distribute food or goods, or help in centers
Offer your expertise, skills and talents. Just do what you love: no matter if you’re a superb cook, swift bike messenger, patient teacher and homework supervisor, experienced bicycle repairer, efficient coordinator, or if friends say you’re on the phone all day anyway: Minga needs you.

Get compensated with impact points
Points can create advantage: instead of working for the Chilean average wage of 2 EUR/hour to then take the $$ to the supermarket and come home with 2 kilos of bread, in our model you would get whatever's there on that day, or and if you save up your points, even that much-needed winter jacket or a phone card.

Benefit from food offers and goods in the nearest center
...which you can exchange for your impact points...

Donate

Donate food and goods without any hidden cost, and decide if to let us take care of pick up and collection.
You will earn impact points for your contributions.

Have an impact on the climate and the people around you.
Few people are aware of the damage that our current food system causes to the environment: overproduction of food means wasting throwing water, energy, and human effort into the bin.


Keep an overview of all your donations
From individuals to large-scale wholesalers, our scalable solution helps you track your donations and deliveries.

Export your donation statistics for easy use in accounting
We automatically gather all the data you need for accounting and certifications of donations for tax purposes.

For Centers

We help you become part of the Circular Economy
Each time you convert overripe tomatoes into pasta sauce, or fruit into jam, or treat people to those very expensive vegetables which they could not afford otherwise, you help mitigate climate change, improve nutrition and create meaningful experiences.

We help you manage your inventory
Minga


We help you be discoverable for the people who need it most
The pandemic has unveiled existing social inequality and pushes millions worldwide into unemployment and poverty...there's undeserved shame associated when all of a sudden you can't feed your kids. Minga is the opposite of standing in line at a charity or food bank: it grants you access to food/goods in exchange for doing what you know how to do best, actively becoming part of a creative change towards a more equal society.

We help you manage your coordinators and helpers
Thanks to the different levels of admin security, Minga allows you to either post simple shifts for cooking and cleaning or assign complex planning, supervision, and coordination tasks to the people you trust.

Our values

Non profit

We are driven by a strong sense of social justice, and our wish is to mitigate the impact of hunger caused by Covid-19 and existing social inequality.

We believe that our participatory model can be the perfect addition to the amazing, quickly growing existing network of charities.
The structure of poverty is changing rapidly, and climate change urges us to seek beyond the borders of what we thought was feasible until Covid hit.

Open Source

All of our software is developed publicly and under an open source license.
Our development process is completely transparent and our software license is the GNU Affero General Public License v3.

We are building a version of Minga that can deployed more easily is and is also cloud vendor independent.
See our development roadmap.

Github

Privacy

We collect only data that is necessary to run the service.
You can unsubscribe any time, and your data will be deleted and never shared with Third Parties.

Participate anonymously
In case you were a donor who wishes to remain incognito, you can simply tick a checkbox for the creation of a confidential reception of the goods, services or funds you'd like to donate.

Contact

We are always open for feedback, cooperations or just questions. Don't hesitate to contact us.
AK

Anke Kessler
Communication, based in Chile
ak (at) minga-app.org

LH

Lukas Himsel
Software, based in Germany
lh (at) minga-app.org