By codifying how new chapters start, the founders turned a school project into something that could be copied.
Noah Duckett and Wyatt Ehrhardt began their food drive in 2024, the year they finished high school in Middleton, Wisconsin. Two years later, according to the Times of India, the initiative they started has grown into a national network and earned them The Diana Award, one of the most prominent honours given to young people. Both are now college sophomores.
The idea was modest at the outset: collect food from neighbours and get it to families who needed it. The pair initially called the effort Middleton Meals Matter, and in the early months they handed the proceeds to WayForward Resources, a local food pantry that stored and distributed the donations. Grocery stores became regular partners. Themed events such as Halloween for Hunger and Summer Stock-Up gave students reasons to return. The report notes that food insecurity in Wisconsin had reached a 30-year high when the two chose food over clothing as the focus of their work.
The growth came from imitation as much as organisation. As the drives became popular, students at other schools asked how to run their own, and Duckett and Ehrhardt built a structure to help them. The non-profit now reports more than 35 high school chapters and over 3,500 young volunteers across the United States and South Korea, and says it has raised more than $550,000 in monetary and food donations. It has since become a 501(c)(3) organisation, and members have met state lawmakers to discuss policy options for fighting food insecurity.
The recognition has followed. The pair won the 2026 William R. Simms Award for Outstanding Youth in Philanthropy and have now added The Diana Award. Ehrhardt said the honour belonged as much to volunteers and community members, adding that students need not wait until they are older to lead. Duckett called the win one of the biggest honours of his life and said representing Wisconsin and Middleton meant everything to him.
What the report does not establish is how the network is governed day to day, how chapters are vetted or funded, or how the $550,000 figure is divided between cash and donated food. It offers no independent assessment of the organisation's reach or impact, and the claims rest on the founders and the award announcement rather than outside audit. Those gaps matter for anyone tempted to read the model as a template.
Even so, the trajectory is instructive. A local effort built around a simple transaction — neighbours give food, a pantry distributes it — found that its scarcest resource was not generosity but structure. By codifying how new chapters start, the founders turned a school project into something that could be copied. That is a modest lesson in how civic initiatives scale, and a reminder that the machinery of replication often matters more than the founding idea.
