As co-founder of the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, Jill Staton Bullard has been a champion for ending hunger in Raleigh and in surrounding counties for more than 27 years.

Jill Staton Bullard is the co-founder of Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, a nationally recognized food rescue organization serving the central area of North Carolina. Jill co-founded the Food Shuttle with her friend Maxine Soloman in 1989. The Food Shuttle’s first operations were out of Jill’s house, with freezers filling the garage and paperwork filling the dining room ta-ble. She has overseen its growth from a small grassroots movement to a driving force in the fight against hunger, currently employing a fleet of 13 refrigerated trucks, a staff of 40, and a workforce of 5,400 volunteers.

Through 26 years of experience, Jill has learned that putting food on a plate only solves the problem of hunger for a brief period of time. Expanding Inter-Faith Food Shuttle’s mission to go beyond hunger relief programs to eliminate the barriers that create hunger – lack of access or income – has become a driving force. The Food Shuttle provides job training for the underemployed, community gardens and teaching farms, children’s nutrition programs like Backpack Buddies and Mobile Hot Meals, and nutrition education for low-income families to remediate the health disparities caused by inadequate nutri-tional intake.

Beyond her extraordinary leadership of the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle, Jill has served on the National Council of America’s Second Harvest, the North Carolina Food Policy Council, the NCSU Park Scholarship Advisory Council, and chaired the Steering Committee of the North Carolina Hunger Summit. She chaired the America’s Second Harvest Service Planning Committee for Food Rescue, is a founding director of NC Hunters for the Hungry, and has served on the national boards of the Society of St. Andrew, Foodchain, and America’s Second Harvest, now Feeding America.

Her work has been featured in national textbooks, magazine articles, and books on the anti-hunger movement. She has been awarded the Exemplar Award from the University of Notre Dame, the University of Notre Dame Award of the Year for Community Service, the William C. Friday Award for Excellence in Leadership, the Salvation Army’s Others Award, the Individual Award for Outstanding Service to the Citizens of Raleigh by the City of Raleigh, and the Triangle Business Jour-nal’s Women in Business Award.

Jill was ordained in the Episcopal Church in June 2008 and serves as Deacon at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in downtown Durham, while working full time as CEO of Inter-Faith Food Shuttle.