Alum of the Month - Meet Jensen Roll!

Hey HOBY!  Are you ready for March's "Alum of the Month"?  I sure 'hope' you said yes to your screen, because this month we are celebrating the outstanding Jensen Roll!  Jensen is a 2010 HOBY ILCS alum from Normal Community High School.  Currently a Junior at Elon University in North Carolina studying Social Entrepreneurship, Jensen is the Co-President of a non-profit called H.O.P.E.

We'll now turn it over to Jensen! 

In Alamance County, the county of Elon University, Allied Churches, the local food kitchen, loses over $10k a month. When I heard this number I knew something needed to change, so I came up with an idea of how to bring in sustainable financial security to nonprofits like Allied Churches. This idea is H.O.P.E. which stands for Helping Other People Eat.

H.O.P.E. is a very simple concept that fills two needs within communities. The first need it fills is the sustained financial support for nonprofits struggling to feed the hungry and the second is to build awareness in the community of issues of hunger and food insecurity. H.O.P.E. does this through a certification system with restaurants. When customers eat at a H.O.P.E. certified restaurant they can opt into having a portion of their check donated to the local food kitchen in their community. H.O.P.E. provides these restaurants with strong advertisement and marketing to bring in more customers and raise more money for places like Allied Churches.


I started H.O.P.E after spending a large amount of time serving in food kitchens, food pantries, and other nonprofits that help people eat. In this time I found two things that were lacking. The first was volunteers with the skills needed to provide everything necessary for the nonprofit to excel and the second and more restrictive was money. 

Learn more by visiting hopecertified.com or one of the social media links below