Who We Are

Who is MAZON?

For more than 37 years, MAZON has been committed to ensuring that vulnerable people have access to the resources they need to put food on the table. MAZON is a leading voice in the anti-hunger field, developing strategic initiatives focused on communities that are at particular risk of hunger and have often been overlooked.

How do we end hunger?

Our nation’s public policies have lasting effects on the lives of millions of people. By promoting systemic change through better policies at the federal, state, and local level, MAZON seeks to ensure that our elected officials understand and consider the needs of the millions of Americans who struggle with hunger. Learn more.

What We Do

MAZON provides training and resources to anti-hunger organizations in the most food insecure states in the U.S., maintaining a network of hundreds of partners and developing strategic initiatives to advance policies that end hunger and the systems that allow it to persist. We also educate and engage individuals and communities about the scope of hunger and how we can work together to end it. Learn more.

Key Priority Areas

In addition to developing relationships with legislators to protect and strengthen the vital federal nutrition programs that help people put food on the table each day, MAZON’s work illuminates the needs and challenges of these specific populations who experience hunger more acutely than the general public. Working together with partner organizations, we identify long-term solutions so that these populations can feed themselves and their families with dignity. Learn about each of our Priority Areas.

History

MAZON was founded by Leonard “Leibel” Fein (z’’l), Theodore Mann (z’’l), and Irv Cramer in 1985. Their motivation to create this new organization was simple: to build a bridge between the relative abundance of the American Jewish community and the desperate need felt by millions of hungry people.

MAZON began by building relationships with rabbis and synagogues across the country, encouraging them to donate a portion of the cost of life-cycle celebrations (weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs, anniversaries, and other joyous occasions), a modern interpretation of the ancient rabbinical tradition of not allowing a celebration to begin until the community’s poor and hungry were seated and fed. American Jews responded to our call to action and, in so doing, validated the importance of a Jewish Response to Hunger.

In its initial years, MAZON’s programmatic work involved making annual grants to small organizations fighting hunger in communities across the country. As the organization grew and its leadership became more deeply engaged with the issue, we quickly understood that the only way we could truly end hunger was to change the circumstances that allowed hunger to persist. Thus MAZON’s focus on advocacy was born, and its influential advocacy work continues to this day.

Today — because of the extraordinary efforts and vision of our founders — MAZON is blessed to have an extended family of nearly 1,000 synagogues, tens of thousands of individual donors, and hundreds of current and former capacity building partners, all of whom share our commitment to ending hunger, not just in the short-term, but once and for all.

Read more about our founder’s vision.

Read more about the history of MAZON’s grantmaking.