A Year of Learning & Increased Impact (and our 2021 annual report is out!)

When FRN made a commitment to transparency to share with our stakeholders how we are working towards fulfilling the overall result we seek to see: to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the United States, we meant it. We made that commitment exactly one year ago and since then, when we launched our strategic framework, FRN10X, we’ve had three public conversations around our work.

The most recent conversation was a recap of what we’ve learned over the prior year, and importantly sought input from all of our stakeholders on the goals we seek to achieve this following year.

We are proud of what we have accomplished this year, including these notable goals:

• The roll out of a new strategic framework, FRN10X, grounded in data and racial equity, to deepen our impact;

• Creation of new gleaning programs which recover food from local and commercial farms across the U.S.; and

• Expansion of our chapter membership model to include community engagement and advocacy as ways students can serve their communities at a time when it is most needed.

Everyone’s world fundamentally shifted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our students faced so many stressful and downright scary moments during COVID-19. Did they have to leave school? Would they have a hybrid model of on-campus and virtual classes and if so, where would they live if not on campus? And like all of us, they wondered if they would be safe. However, we really must commemorate and celebrate the tenacity of our movement. During all of this uncertainty, our members propelled FRN to recover more food than ever before - more than 1.3 million pounds of food, which lead to 1 million meals being provided to individuals experiencing homelessness, children and youth, unemployed or underemployed individuals, older adults, veterans, people with disabilities, immigrants, and other under-resourced groups experiencing hunger.

We have so much to celebrate and we have detailed our annual accomplishments in our FY21 Annual Report, which we encourage you to read to learn more. And please do share the link with those in your life whom you think might be interested, too.

Fundamental to what we seek to achieve this coming year, we are carrying forward two main learnings from this past year:

• Organizational partnerships are key to scaling our impact. In FY22, we seek to establish 2-3 additional collaborations to help better serve communities across the U.S.

• Racial/Ethnic disparities continue to widen, making investment in Black and Brown communities critical to feeding those experiencing hunger. In FY22, FRN will commit more time and resources to partnering with local nonprofits across the country to feed people faster, in areas where it is most needed.

FRN blog posts will continue to be a source of learning and sharing to help further the student movement to recover food to feed all who are experiencing hunger in the U.S. while fighting climate change. Please continue to check back to read more about our work, progress, and when you are ready to be involved, or be involved further, please contact us.

Takeaways from my Recent Conversation, “Unpacking Food Policy”

On September 29, Emily Broad Leib, Clinical Professor of Law, Faculty Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, and Deputy Director of the Harvard Law School Center for Health Law and Policy, and I had a conversation about food policy. Emily discussed food policy from many different altitudes- federal, state and local- and how we can all become curious and knowledgeable about food policy in our lives.

I hope you find this conversation as fascinating as I did and that this whets your appetite to explore food policy even more. I encourage you to watch the recording of our conversation here where you can dive more into Emily’s key insights, including: 

• Food policy involves a tangled web of actors, with no one “leader” who streamlines it. When you listen to Emily’s examples of how food policy shows up in our lives, you can start seeing ways that you can be involved.

• Over the past 10 to 15 years, Emily has seen an increased interest at the community level in consumers, teachers, health professionals, and producers of food to determine the priorities of our food system, which has created tremendous opportunities to shape food policy.

• Food policy and equity are not always woven together and certain groups have historically been left out of opportunities, which has long-term implications for those communities.

During our conversation Emily also gave us all two calls to action: 

• Even a small action you take can make a big impact when you take the time to dig into it. Individuals have an opportunity to make a difference in food policy and FRN’s audience has a central spot in this space already!

• Get involved in your state or local food policy council. This will help you gain more expertise and knowledge and understand more how food policy fits into the work you do.

I hope you can tune in to our conversation together and find inspiration to continue learning about and engaging with food policy. Please share this valuable information with your friends and family and we can begin to help build a better food system that works for everyone!

Why is Food Recovery Verified good for businesses?

For the past three years, I’ve worked to expand Food Recovery Network’s Food Recovery Verified program, which provides tailored support and recognition to food businesses and event planners that seek to donate their surplus food. During this time, I’ve taken calls with hundreds of people to help them establish food recovery programs, and I am not even close to being tired of this work. Why is that? It’s because I know the potential impact that even one food recovery program can have on other people and the planet. Read on to learn about two amazing food recovery programs that are really making a difference. 

FRV Events

In 2019, Bob Goldberg, CEO of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), made food recovery a priority at all NAR events and for their member association’s events. This set into motion a dynamic partnership between NAR and FRN that is changing the way event planners, culinary professionals, and attendees think about food service at events and how they can make a difference.

Over the past two years, I have worked with NAR’s team of passionate, caring event planners to establish food recovery programs at 18 different events, 15 of which led to food recovery. During this time, NAR event planners have become incredible advocates for food recovery and donation. While working to establish food recovery plans they’ve faced situations where there’s a lack of interest or fear of liability from the venues they work with, making food recovery difficult. However, their determination to do the right thing with their surplus food has prompted meaningful conversations about food donation which probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.  

To date, NAR has diverted from landfills and donated 1,608 pounds of surplus food through this program, which equates to 1,340 meals for community members in cities across the country. Their team is still pushing to make food recovery the norm, and we continue to support their efforts.  

FRV Businesses

Indiana State University (ISU) joined the Food Recovery Verified (FRV) community in 2017 and is still actively donating surplus food today. For the past four years, ISU has maintained a direct partnership with Catholic Charities in Terre Haute, a local nonprofit organization that serves vulnerable community members, to donate their surplus food, even through the pandemic.

In Terre Haute, IN the food insecurity rate is 16.1%, which is 6% higher than the national average. Since becoming Verified, ISU has donated 4,085 pounds of surplus food, which converts to 3,404 meals for the people served by Catholic Charities in Terre Haute.

Additionally, by having a food recovery program in place, ISU prevented a significant amount of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking five cars off the road. Over time, food recovery programs like this one can substantially reduce the impact that food-producing businesses have on the environment.

ISU’s partnership with Catholic Charities in Terre Haute and their leadership to reduce food waste demonstrates how one food recovery program can create a ripple effect of benefit that extends throughout the community.

Start Recovering!

Recovering and donating surplus food is a highly impactful solution to reducing food waste, and it’s in the best interest of businesses to explore this as an option to manage surplus. Thankfully, our team at Food Recovery Network is here to offer help and support! 

Ready to get started? Schedule a call with our team or email us at foodrecoveryverified@foodrecoverynetwork.org, and be sure to visit our website to learn more about the Food Recovery Verified program. 

Understanding Food Policy: where does it fit in the food recovery puzzle?

I recently posted about the concept of large numbers. The idea is that when we are confronted with very large data points or statistics, in particular about people or the environment, our brain does this very interesting thing of freezing in inaction, concluding that we can’t do anything about the situation because it is so large. One of the large numbers is a data point that FRN references every day: 42 million people are currently food insecure today. Forty-two million people is a huge number of people who are hungry, and it’s a hard number to visualize in our minds. What does 42 million people in one place look like? And if all of those people are hungry, it’s easy to slip into the mindset of, this is such a huge issue that I couldn’t possibly begin to help unless I gave up my day job.

I encourage you to read the blog post, but I’ll offer a spoiler if you don’t have a chance to read it: you can help, and you do not have to drop everything to help solve this societal issue. You can help by focusing on smaller numbers that are in the scope of your local community. You can, for example, help start an FRN chapter at the college or university closest to where you live, or share educational information about food waste, or donate financially to support the efforts of food recovery.

I wanted to write about this idea of large numbers and what it can potentially make us not do —  how it can leave us in a state of inaction — and encourage us to get comfortable with hearing large numbers and converting them into ones that mean something to us. From there, when we think about the 42 million people who are food insecure, we can then say, I know that there must be food insecure people in my neighborhood. And from there, we can then find action steps we can take with even just a little bit of time to make positive change in our immediate surroundings to support food recovery efforts.

I have just the opportunity to share with all of you to support you in moving into action. On September 29, at 2pm EST, I am talking with Emily Broad Lieb of the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic about another very big idea: food policy. Policy can seem very conceptual and difficult to place in our day-to-day lives. Emily will talk with all of us about what food policy is, what are some familiar federal food policies, and what are some state policies. We’ll then talk about how these policies can ensure people have the food they deserve, what happens when those policies cannot feed everyone, and what we, as community members, can do to help get food to those who need it most. 

Please consider yourself formally invited! Don’t forget to register, and see you then!

How we can all move from inaction to action today

I find the idea of the human brain “freezing into immobility”, shutting down or ignoring data when faced with big numbers, fascinating. Have you heard about this concept or seen it play out in real life? The concept describes how we can become paralyzed into inaction when we hear a statistic that is so huge that it’s difficult to visualize or understand. For example, take the fact that there are 120 million people living in poverty in this country. What does 120 million of something look like? Who are these people? The number just doesn’t resonate with us because it’s so hard to truly understand. In the same way, we know that Earth is warming to 1.5 degrees hotter than pre-industrial times, but what does this actually mean or look like? When we take in a number that is so big, or in this case, so conceptual and on such a large scale, we can freeze into immobility. What can we do about something so big, we ask ourselves. Probably nothing. So we don’t act.

But the food recovery movement and Food Recovery Network respond differently when faced with such huge problems. In fact, the co-founders of FRN were in college almost a decade ago, learning about the problems of the climate crisis, hunger, homelessness, and more, and the very large numbers associated with these problems. 

The founders of Food Recovery Network and the thousands of people who’ve participated in our work since then recognize these large numbers, including this one: 42 million people in the United States are currently food insecure. Many of those millions of people are college students just like themselves. Many are young children. Our student chapter leaders take this big number and break that number down into a more personal and relatable concept: I know that means people in my very own community are suffering. I know people that I go to school with are hungry. From this understanding, our network moves into action. Our students begin to tackle the problem of food insecurity from the sphere of their control: I can help to feed those around me who are hungry.

We all know people in our communities right now who are hungry, and by participating in the efforts of Food Recovery Network by going on recoveries, educating fellow students and administrators about food insecurity and hunger on campus or in their community, by talking to restaurants, by financially contributing to FRN, people can begin to whittle down the number of people who are hungry today. It doesn’t take a lot of time, and by focusing on where we can act, we can move out of that feeling of immobility and join the efforts across the whole country to tackle this big number.

Here, let me show you what I mean. In any community in the United States, there are institutions of higher education nearby. You can look on our website to see if the higher education institution near you, or one that you are affiliated with, has an FRN chapter. And if not? Please get in touch with someone you know who attends, who’s a faculty or staff member, or someone else affiliated that you know and ask them about starting a chapter. Introduce us to someone who is interested in starting a chapter by emailing us at programs@foodrecoverynetwork.org. That person may be able to open the door to establishing a chapter by connecting us with the right person. With this simple connection, you are creating change to help people in your community, and thawing the “freeze brain” we sometimes feel when problems seem too big for us to make an impact. 

By taking that step into action, you can feed someone who is hungry today.