When I came to Food Recovery Network (FRN), a little under a year ago, our Executive Director Regina Anderson shared with me her vision of a network that would grow ten-fold, and a movement that would represent a more just and equitable food system. My job as the first Chief Operating Officer (COO) was to make that happen. To begin, I leveraged the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Results Count Framework.
Results Count® is a data-driven methodology to close racial and ethnic disparities in your work, regardless of focus area. For us at FRN, this meant getting specific about the result we seek in the world and how we will keep ourselves accountable to contributing to make progress on it. For FRN, our result is to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S.
While we recognize FRN cannot alone achieve this goal, we identified where FRN can have a unique contribution to moving our movement closer to achieving it. Using two publicly available data sets, the EPA’s excess food map, and Feeding America’s Map, the Meal Gap, on the number of people experiencing hunger, we overlaid these data sets on maps where FRN also has chapters. Looking at the states with BOTH ample opportunities of recovering surplus food and more than 20% of the state’s population experiencing hunger, we prioritized ten states where we believe we can replicate FRN’s structure of recovering surplus food from commercial/industrial settings; and then redistributing it so we can feed more people, where there is the most need, faster.
The states are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. More details on each state can be found below.
It is important to note our support of chapters across the U.S. will continue as will our growth on campuses across the nation because of the dedication of our student leaders who see access to food as a right, and FRN as a way to help people in their community today.
Please join us in expanding our network in each of these states. You can do this by donating to FRN to support our outreach or connecting with program staff to connect us with the appropriate person at your school.