After spending almost 1.5 years operating as a virtual club, organizing this recovery in the first week of in-person classes was, honestly, a little difficult. While some of our chapter members and our school’s Office of Sustainability were able to help us collect food from the nearby hospital during the pandemic, getting our usual volunteers back into the swing of things this fall was a bit of an adjustment. Most of us hadn’t driven our electric vehicle, named GEMA, in quite a while and the last time a lot of us had done a food recovery was before lockdown. Nevertheless, we were very excited to be able to participate in our first big recovery of the semester!
Our chapter recruited three volunteers to help us recover the leftover food from the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) Leadership Summit at the Sheraton Grand Hotel in Chicago.
While we weren’t able to take all of the food, we did collect one box of apples, three boxes of sandwiches, one box of fruit cups, and a few boxes of pastries, bringing our first recovery of the semester to a total of 120 pounds of food recovered. We donated the food to Franciscan Outreach, a local homeless shelter that we’ve partnered with for the past few years and to whom we often donate food. Hopefully we will be able to recover more food from future NAR events, but until then, our chapter looks forward to all of the recoveries we have planned this semester.
A note from FRN’s Program Manager:
I am so proud of the commitment our students at UIC showed for this recovery effort. It’s not common that FRN National calls upon our chapters to support food recovery programs outside of their campuses, but we had the opportunity to pilot this model with the UIC and LUC chapters for the first time this summer. With any pilot, there are often a few curveballs, and the UIC chapter faced some difficult circumstances when the supplies we ordered for the food recovery weren’t delivered on time. Despite the packaging issues, the UIC chapter arrived on time and recovered as much food as they could possibly fit into their vehicle. On behalf of FRN National, I’d like to thank these students for their support and their tenacity to recover and donate this food!