This donation-funded program provides ground venison to Nebraskans in need. The Nebraska Game & Parks Commission accepts cash donations to the program and uses those funds to pay contracted meat processors to prepare and package ground venison from deer donated by hunters. The processors contact the charitable organizations specified by the commission, who pick up and distribute the venison. Hunters do not pay a processing fee if their deer is donated to the program.
Legislation requires that all program costs be paid for only with donated funds, so the balance of donations received by early summer of each year are used to establish the budget for the following deer harvest seasons. A fair market processing price of $85 per deer carcass is offered to processors. Interested processors can apply to contract as Hunters Helping the Hungry program deer donation sites.
Processor contracts state how many donated deer they may accept from hunters, and once the quotas are met, no additional deer can be accepted under the program. Processors are asked to accept only whole deer that will likely yield at least 40 pounds of high quality ground venison. So some deer offered by hunters may not be accepted by the processors even if that processor has not yet met their quota.
By summer 2012, the commission received enough cash donations to budget processing for 271 deer through January 2013. In all, 188 hunters donated 213 deer, resulting in 11,536 pounds of venison distributed through sixteen different charitable organizations across the state. The dollars budgeted for processing venison in the first year that were not used due to unfulfilled quotas, will be added to the budget for the second year.
Many hunters were very generous; one out of every nine hunters who donated a deer, donated more than one. Landowner permits accounted for about one in five of all permits used to harvest donated deer, and one in eight permits used to donate deer were harvested from non-resident permits.
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