Executive Summary:

Mealshare exists to combat youth hunger. Mealshare partners with Canadian restaurants and places their logo beside a few menu items. When one of those menu items is ordered, the customer receives their meal as normal, and Mealshare provides one meal to a youth in need. Buy one, give one – it’s that simple!

In 2013, Mealshare was established and partnered with their first 4 restaurants. They now work with over 300 restaurants across 30 Canadian communities and have served over 1,300,000 meals to those in need.  With Mealshare’s current capacity, they will be able to continue to share meals at their current rate of 50,000 meals per month. However, 1 in 4 kids are still living their lives malnourished. In order to create greater impact, they want to expand across North America.

Mealshare’s current bottleneck is at the leadership level: now, their co-founders and highest-level staff manage 5 Community Leaders (in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, and Austin TX). The time required to manage these Community Leaders limits their leaders’ time to do things like business development, systemization of operations, and high-level leadership duties.

As such, Mealshare requires an adjustment in employee structure; they plan to hire a dedicated Community Leader Manager to manage and support our current Community Leaders, as well as 4 additional Community Leaders in 2018.

This hiring decision will have the following results:

1. 25 hours/week of senior staff’s time (15 hours per week is currently spent managing Community Leaders, and an additional 10 hours per week with the new growth in 2018) will be freed up to:

• Develop high-level partnerships with organizations outside of restaurants (ex. recent partnerships with OpenTable.com and Air Miles)
• Systemizing operations across all aspects of day-to-day business.
• Focus on more speaking engagements such as Ted Talks, We Day (the co-founders recently went to We Day and spoke to 20,000 youth game-changers!), University panels, Social Enterprise conferences, and Key Note opportunities.
• Travel for in-person meetings with key stakeholders (major restaurant chains, influencers, supporters, etc).

2. More streamlined support for Community Leaders.  This will result in 40 additional restaurants joining the program in 2018 than would otherwise join without a full time CLM. These 40 restaurants will share 48,000 meals in 2018, and an additional 120,000 in 2019 (and beyond!).

Measurable Outcomes:

1. A full-time Community Leader Manager (CLM) will be employed to manage Mealshare’s Community Leaders (Community Leaders are ‘boots-on-the-ground’ employees who run the program in specific cities). Currently, Mealshare has 5 Community Leaders and will be adding 4 more as Mealshare is expanded in 2018 for a total of 9 Community Leaders by Dec 31, 2018.
2. Mealshare will be launched in 40 additional restaurants than they would not otherwise have had the capacity to do. The goal is 620 partner restaurants by December 31, 2018. Currently, they have 320 partner restaurants.
3. 25 hours per week will be freed up from the high-level leadership team’s schedule by December 31, 2018. This additional time will allow Mealshare’s leaders to create new partnerships, systematize operations, and do more speaking engagements.