This unassuming man devoted his time and energy to help people few others noticed—those desperate and hungry on the peripheries, including the families who found themselves suddenly poor and who could find food only by scavenging through dumpsters.

The poverty John van Hengel witnessed led him in 1967 to establish the world’s first food bank—an idea that expanded from a church in Arizona into a movement that eventually spread around the world. Today, tens of millions are being fed every day because John van Hengel had an idea. A man of tremendous faith and quiet piety, John was also blessed with a ferocious passion for feeding the poor.

“John was a very humble man,” Claudia Cucitro, a fundraiser from Phoenix, told Phoenix Magazine in 2018. “But if he needed to advocate for something, his personality quickly went from being a lamb to a lion.” People like that can often change the world. And John van Hengel did.

Struggling to Find His Way. John was born in Waupun, Wisconsin, in 1923, the son of a nurse and the town pharmacist. After college and some time in graduate school in Wisconsin, he dropped out and headed to Southern California, where he lived for a time as what he called a “first-rate beach bum.” He bounced around in odd jobs that included everything from driving a beer truck to working as a magazine publicist. Eventually he settled down to marry and start a family.

But in 1960, his marriage fell apart. As he told The Arizona Republic in 1974, “I was holding down an executive job, living high, when suddenly I was a divorced man. I had nothing to work for anymore.” He returned to Wisconsin, where he landed a job working in a rock quarry. One night John tried to break up a bar fight. He ended up so badly injured that he became partially paralyzed and had to spend weeks in rehab. John’s doctor recommended that he move to Arizona, where the climate might help him heal. John took that advice, and it changed his whole life.

Making the Most of a Second Chance. In Phoenix, John slowly regained his strength by swimming laps in the YMCA pool. That led to his next job: at the age of forty-four, he became the city’s oldest public lifeguard.

Finding a new focus and a new purpose in Phoenix, John believed God had given him a second chance. A lifelong and devoted Catholic, he took a private vow of poverty and began working at a local Catholic church and volunteering at a St. Vincent de Paul soup kitchen. The hunger John saw moved him to action. He bought an old delivery truck for $150 and started collecting unused food from farms and homes to distribute to local charities scattered around the city.

In time, all the driving around gave him an idea: Why not bring all the food to just one location? He approached a priest at St. Mary’s Church to ask about setting up a central spot where food could be collected and given out. The church thought it was worth a shot. In 1967, St. Mary’s gave him $3,000 and the use of an abandoned former bakery.

John’s idea turned out to be a game-changer. Lines at the building grew. One day John met an unemployed mother who told him he should check out the “store” where she found food for her ten children. “Where?” he asked. She walked him over to a dumpster behind a grocery store and showed him. The bin was filled with discarded but unspoiled food: dented tin cans, vegetables, and boxes of ingredients that could still be used in a kitchen.

John set about collecting food from the dumpster to reuse. Soon, he went right to the source: he got restaurants and supermarkets to donate discarded and surplus food before it got tossed out. This resulted in an amazing turn of events.

Filling a Critical Need. Within months, the place he dubbed “St. Mary’s Food Bank” was distributing food to countless people who flocked to the center of Phoenix to be fed. In the first year alone, the bank gave away 250,000 pounds of food to the hungry.

Other communities soon heard about what was happening. John started organizing similar food banks throughout Arizona and, eventually, around the country. In the late 1970s, he consolidated his idea into a network of food banks called Second Harvest, which was formally incorporated as a charity in 1979. As Second Harvest grew and expanded, John developed a list of standards and practices for food banks to follow to maintain quality control.

In the 1980s, he founded Food Bank, Inc., a nonprofit that implemented his ideas in other countries. With that, a concept that started in a dumpster behind a Phoenix grocery store became a global phenomenon. Second Harvest eventually evolved into Feeding America, a nonprofit network of food banks that, according to its most recent annual report, managed to provide 5.3 billion meals to hungry men, women, and children in a one-year span.

A Humble Life. For all that success, John remained, for the most part, anonymous. He lived modestly and refused a salary during his time at St. Mary’s. He lived on savings he had put aside during his earlier life in the business world and rarely took credit for what he had created. “I’d be a fool if I pretended to have any great vision,” he told a reporter. “I just planted a seed and water came from a hundred directions.”

He continued to visit the original food bank as long as his health permitted. In 2005, after a series of strokes and a battle with Parkinson’s disease, he died at a Phoenix hospice in his early eighties.

Two decades later, his story is beginning to reach a wider audience. A few years ago, the writer Jeff Gottesfeld was stumped when his young daughter reflected, “I wonder where food banks came from.” Curious, he decided to find out, and he discovered the life and work of John van Hengel. In 2023 he adapted it into an award-winning children’s book, Food for Hope. Remarkably, it’s the only book that’s been written about John. During his life, he resisted every effort for someone to write a biography and bring his story to the world.

An Interfaith Effort. Gottesfeld, who is Jewish, found a powerful connection to the Catholic van Hengel. His work and witness resonated with Gottesfeld’s own Jewish heritage.

“You know,” Gottesfeld said, “if you go to the Talmud, there’s this wonderful line, which basically says that if there’s no bread, there’s no Torah. So if you’re hungry, you’re not going to be able to think about holy things because you’re hungry. And you’ve got to eat. So there’s this great tradition in Judaism about feeding the hungry. Every Passover at our seders, you know, we say to those who are hungry, ‘Come and eat.’”

This story of a simple man who undertook a life of sacrifice and service, Gottesfeld explained, should move and inspire us all. The notion of feeding those who hunger is both timeless and timely.

Drawing from his Christian faith, John van Hengel often quoted John’s Gospel, but with a slight difference—one Gottesfeld cited in the preface of his book. “This was his guiding principle,” Gottesfeld wrote. “‘The poor will always be with us, but why the hungry?’”

It’s a question for which the world is still seeking answers. John van Hengel's story reminds us of the impact that one person can have. Even more poignantly, it shows how God can use what’s been dented and damaged and discarded—whether it’s a tin can or a human life—to do something wonderful.

Deacon Greg Kandra is the author of the highly acclaimed blog The Deacon’s Bench and multiple books, including The Busy Person’s Guide to Prayer, which can be found at wau.org/books.