Helen verDuin Palit

For Helen verDuin Palit, the recipe for success contains a mixture of public education, a caring heart and a potato skin appetizer. From that combination, the graduate of Chagrin Falls EV’s Chagrin Falls High School has gone on to play a part in feeding more than 10 billion hungry people around the world. “The (Chagrin Falls EV) teachers creatively stimulated me, the ‘quiet one,’ to think outside of the box,” Palit said. Thinking outside the box is how Palit came up with the brilliant idea that changed the lives of billions. She grew up in Chagrin Falls and, after high school graduated from Texas Tech University and then went to work for Yale University. After a workday at Yale’s Dwight Hall Soup Kitchen, she stopped in a restaurant for a drink and an order of potato skins. As she ate, she wondered what had happened to the insides of those potatoes? She asked the chef, who told her that every morning he threw away what he couldn’t use. The next day, the chef delivered 30 gallons of potatoes to Yale’s soup kitchen, and Palit founded the New Haven Food Salvage Project in 1981. Palit continued to gather other donated leftovers and quickly was managing a gourmet soup kitchen. Three months later, there was too much food so Palit expanded the system to deliver to 35 shelters daily, pioneering the first Harvest program. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush named Palit his fourth Point of Light in his Thousand Points of Light for Community Service Award program with the mandate to “replicate the successful nonprofit to any city that needed this unique service.” In response, Palit founded America Harvest Inc. in 1990 — another nonprofit that teaches others how to organize and manage their own Harvest programs. In all, she has founded or taught the founders of 1,335 independent Harvest programs in 10 countries. She was nominated for the 2009 World Food Prize and is currently working on the launch of Maple Leaf Harvest in Canada. Before you finish your dinner tonight, the Harvest teams of the world will feed another 2 million people today. It’s a good thing Palit had an appetite for potato skins, as well as an appetite to teach and serve.