Started in a driveway
Between 2006 and 2009, Jeanette Valdez Duran was living on the streets of North Austin. Finding food was a daily problem and some days it went unsolved. What she remembers most from those years is a convenience-store manager who treated her with kindness when nobody else did — the thing she credits with turning her life around and bringing her back to her family in 2009.
Years later, back on her feet, she started giving food away from her parents' driveway on Munson Street in East Austin. Five or ten people came the first week. Within months the line wrapped down the block and was blocking traffic, so the operation moved to a large vacant lot down the street — the same open lot at 3614 Munson where it runs today. A truckload of donations from Rose Smith of Black Women in Business was the moment it turned from a driveway effort into something the whole neighborhood could count on.
How it works now
Mobile Blessings From The Heart feeds roughly 500 people a week. Food comes from the Central Texas Food Bank, Trader Joe's, Costco, and grocery stores that call when a refrigeration unit fails and product has to move fast — the team retrieves it before it's thrown out. Rather than handing everyone the same pre-packed box, they lay it out so people pick what their household will actually eat: produce, bread, meat, canned and dry goods, and often a bouquet of rescued flowers. Alongside the Friday and Saturday lot days they run pop-up pantries in senior communities, near schools, and in unhoused camps around the city.
Jeanette's rule for who qualifies is short: “Whoever needs food — who's just hungry. You don't need to be poor; you don't need to be homeless.”
Small, faith-driven, recognised
The organisation is a Texas nonprofit corporation formed in October 2022 and an IRS-registered 501(c)(3) (EIN 87-2879158). It runs on a tiny budget — small enough that it files the IRS short form for charities under $50,000 a year — which makes the weekly numbers more remarkable, not less. The mission statement on their site is one line: a nonprofit “here to serve our God by distributing food to our community.”
In 2025 KXAN named Jeanette its Remarkable Woman of the year, and that May the Texas House of Representatives adopted H.R. 900 honoring her and the organisation. Her stated next goal is a permanent distribution center with refrigeration, so more restaurant and grocery surplus can be saved instead of wasted.
How to help
They take volunteers for distribution mornings and donations through their site. If you run a restaurant, grocery, or food business in Austin with surplus you'd rather see eaten than dumped, they are exactly who to call.