Framing Cultural Words as Actionable Pursuits

When we are talking about equity, it can be fun, it can be with love and “it has to be [done with all of these things], otherwise, it’s not.” — Sara Gray

I love to talk about words that encompass big cultural pursuits. Words like compassion, leadership, investment. These are words that deserve deep consideration, conversation, and activation to fully understand the pursuits they stand in for. We also need to consider their context in the past, present and future, because when you “freeze frame”, as I like to say, on any one moment, chances are high that you’ll miss their full texture and meaning.   

Recently I created an entire campaign around another “big” word, equity. I wanted to spend time exploring the word equity and how its meaning encompasses the pursuit of equity. What does equity look like, and what does it sound like? How do we do equity? Can partial equity be achieved, and can equity exist in the presence of inequitable activities? The list of questions goes on and on, and this campaign was an opportunity to dive into these questions and to build my own practice of equity.

To further my practice, in early January I spoke with Sara Gray, Senior Director of Communications and Marketing at the National Equity Project, on Instagram Live. For the past 17 years Sara has worked at a national nonprofit whose mission is to support systemic change to increase the capacity of people to achieve thriving, self-determining, educated, and just communities. It felt like a great practice point to dig into the term equity - as a verb, a noun, a practice, a state of being - with Sara.

It’s an understatement to say Sara dropped an immense amount of knowledge for us all during the conversation. I was so touched by the conversation because of the deep thinking and care present that is so clearly habitual to Sara. I was moved to seek out the resources Sara mentioned as part of my own continuous learning, and I went back through the conversation to list the resources for all of us. I’ll share these in my next blog post, and I hope these spark inspiration and action for you as it did for me.

Before you read the next post with our resources, I have FOUR asks of you:

1. Share with me what struck you about my conversation with Sara. You can find the recording here on my personal IG!

2. Consider becoming a recurring monthly donor to Food Recovery Network. The conversation with Sara is part of a series of conversations I’m hosting about equity to underscore my pursuit to activate enough monthly donors for FRN to reach $1,000 per month in recurring donations. This would be used to help underwrite a portion of FRN’s employer paid health insurance costs. You can learn more about my Birthday Equity Walk by reading my linkedin article.

3. Become familiar with the National Equity Project. I am hopeful to have a second conversation with Sara on FRN’s platform later this year.

4. At the start of this post I wondered, how do we talk about words that represent big cultural pursuits? How do you talk about these words? How do you make these words into actionable pursuits? I think about this work of activation as a practice, and one way to talk about these big cultural words is, with and in love, to just start.

I would like to end with the definition of love that I read in bell hooks’ 2001 book All About Love, taken from M. Scott Peck: love is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is an act of will—namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

With love,

Regina

FRN and the Poor People’s Campaign: a powerful partnership working towards economic security

Result: recover food to feed everyone who is hungry in the US

FRN’s strategic framework has one singular result: to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the US. There are many unique contributions FRN is working toward to achieve ending enduring hunger as we know it in the US. One of two indicators that we aim to achieve to reach this result is to ensure the economic security of the 42 million people who are food insecure in the US. 

If you’ve attended any of the Roundtable Talks hosted by FRN this program year or even skimmed our email updates, you know about our framework that we’re calling FRN10X. If this sounds unfamiliar or new to you, I encourage you to look through our Roundtable Talks webpage and to sign up for our newsletter because there is a role for each of you in the movement to recover food to feed everyone who is hungry in the US.

Strategy to achieve result: Powerful Partnerships

We have three strategies to achieve our indicators and our ultimate result, one of which is to develop powerful partnerships to help grow our network from 4,000 to 40,000 people in the next 10 years. Please consider this your formal invitation to be part of this movement. We know that including more people in our work through powerful partnerships will expedite our work to get more precious food into communities experiencing food insecurity. 

Time and again we have seen that when FRN fosters and engages relationships with other organizations, the resulting partnership helps us accomplish our goals faster and with a greater impact than we would have accomplished on our own. Here I want to highlight a new powerful partnership that FRN developed with the Poor People’s Campaign this year.

Indicator to achieve result: economic security of the 42 million people who are food insecure

Though we partner with the Poor People’s Campaign at the national state levels, I want to discuss our national partnership here. To achieve the systems-level change of ensuring the economic security of the 42 million people who are food insecure in the US, we need to first understand the reasons why so many millions of people are struggling to the point where they do not have consistent access to the food they and their families deserve. We especially need to understand why, when we know that more than 12% of the entire US population does not have enough food to eat, we continue to allow this to happen.

At a policy level, when we understand how policies allow or encourage people to go hungry, we can change those policies so this is no longer allowed to happen. This is how we came to partner with the Poor People’s Campaign to push for policy change that improves the economic security of poor people in the US, many of whom are food insecure.

Fostering a Powerful Partnership with The Poor People’s Campaign

This year the Poor People’s Campaign Policy Director Shailly Barnes joined me as a guest speaker for a conversation I hosted about community disinvestment. At the national level, Shailly discussed what we can all do from a policy perspective to ensure the economic security of the millions of people who are working so hard each and every day, but who do not have the resources to acquire the food they deserve consistently. Shailly talked about permanently implementing the child tax credit that for a short period of time lifted many children out of poverty. She also noted that making the earned income tax credit permanent would significantly support working families. I agree with her and I encourage all of you to learn more about the particular fights to make these two tax credits permanent.

FRN partners with the Poor People’s Campaign on another proposed policy change that we believe will help ensure the economic security of the 42 million people who are food insecure: the fight to adopt a federal level $15 per hour minimum wage.

FRN is joining the “Fight for $15”

FRN has joined the “fight for $15”, which seeks to update the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour. We’re joining this critical push to support fair wages for hourly workers because our network is composed of young people, current students and alumni, dining staff, and farm workers alike, who are often working hourly wage positions and deserve a fair wage for their work. We need to be sure their time is compensated fairly so they can pay for their rent or mortgage, food, transportation, education, and other basic life necessities. There are millions of people working multiple jobs in the US for a federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Our neighbors and loved ones working hourly for $7.25 per hour have children, they have elderly parents they’re taking care of, they have hopes and dreams that further education can support them to achieve. However, they will not begin to advance upon those dreams, let alone have consistent access to food and housing while stuck in the rut of poverty and being working poor that $7.25 per hour almost certainly ensures. Morally, we have an obligation to stop this crisis of continuing to hold so many people back, including the many incredible people that the food FRN donates feeds every single day.

I will continue to talk more about the fight for $15 that FRN has joined in future blogs, so that we can share more of the details about what a federal minimum wage increase like this can mean. In the meantime, I wrote this blog post with more information and action steps that came from my conversation with Shailly Barnes and others dedicated to ensuring our communities thrive. This is a good place to start learning about the struggles of so many people in our very neighborhoods who are working hard every single day to get by.

Another resource I want to share is a report written by Shailly Barnes, along with Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, Josh Bivens, Krista Fairies, Thea M. Lee and Reverend Dr. Liz Theoharis produced in collaboration with The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The report first appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of American Educator and I picked it up when it appeared in The Economic Policy Institute website. The report is called “Moral Policy = Good Policy: Lifting up poor and working-class people — and our whole economy.” The report reminds us, and asks us to consider, that “this inequality in the United States did not happen suddenly and cannot be explained as the consequence of individual failures; rather, decades of public policies brought us to this point, making the rich richer at the expense of everybody else. When we fail to meet basic needs for food, housing, and health care for everyone, when we fail to invest in education, safe communities, and fair elections, the health and well-being of our entire nation is compromised.”

Lastly, I hope you can sign your name to the pledge to fight for $15, and join our newsletter to stay updated on this topic, FRN10X and our work to feed more people, faster. As always, I hope you will share your thoughts with us, too.

Food recovery, Football, and FRNds galore! 🙌

Below is a short report back to you, our amazing network, on how Food Recovery Network was able to recover close to 2,000 pounds of food for neighbors in Los Angeles experiencing food insecurity on the day of Super Bowl LVI. By being in FRN’s corner, you made this recovery a reality.

My fellow FRN team members Cassie and Erin flew with me to LA to provide on-the-ground support to recover surplus food from The Players Tailgate on February 13, 2022. The Players Tailgate is a massive event catered by celebrity chef Guy Fieri during the Super Bowl, a 50,000 square foot experience filled with decadent food stations run by Fieri’s chef friends. 

After the Tailgate, as guests shuffled into SoFi stadium to watch the big game, it was go-time for the FRN team and our amazing volunteers, including an alum and members of the new FRN chapter at Chapman University. There was A LOT of food to recover. Our Instagram page has tons of content showing a behind the scenes look at the food recovery!

© Ellen Friedlander

Had FRN not been there, so much unopened and unprepared seafood, pallets of butter, milk, bread, salad greens, onions, and herbs would have been unnecessarily discarded. However, because our longtime partners at Operation BBQ were involved in planning the logistics of the Players Tailgate, they contacted FRN to develop a plan to recover any surplus event food. 

Operation BBQ asked us to set up a recovery program for the Tailgate just as we had done in 2020 for previous Operation BBQ events. We were able to say yes to this event because our partner, the National Association of REALTORS®, supported the financial costs to FRN to accomplish this recovery. Individual donations to FRN also ensure we can coordinate big recoveries like this one. 

Once we confirmed, Operation BBQ connected us to the group organizing the Players Tailgate, Bullseye Event Group, to hash out the details of the recovery: when the event would be over and we could start packing up the food, what food would be donated, and where the food would be located within the event space. 

Erin, FRN’s Program Manager, then began making calls to find nonprofit partner agencies who could receive the food (and there is so much that goes into that process!) and calls to our local chapters in the area who could help us on the ground with the actual recovery.

Photo Credit: LA Times / Stephanie Breijo

© Ellen Friedlander

We partnered with Hollywood Food Coalition and the Westside Food Bank to distribute the amazing food we recovered from the Tailgate, and our local FRN chapter at Chapman University stepped up to volunteer at the event. Thank you to Hilary, Nicole, and Audrey! We were also joined by FRN alum and Secretary of FRN’s Student and Alumni Advisory Board, Alexi, and her mom.

Our joint effort was a huge success and brought more than 1,500 meals to the LA community. 

There is so much more to share about the Players Tailgate recovery, and we recommend you check out our social media to see what we were up to during the Tailgate! We also received incredible media coverage at the event. Read this LA Times article and watch this ABC7LA video for a deeper look into what it takes to pull off a big food recovery. 

Also, please consider being an individual donor or making an additional gift if you already contribute to our work so we can feed more people, faster! Your financial support ensures FRN can say yes to large scale recoveries by offsetting the costs to complete those recoveries.

A solar moment for FRN

We have a big announcement to share with everyone! This is a once in a lifetime moment and we are out of this world excited!

As of 2/22/22, aka the ultimate TWOSday, FRN achieved TWO huge milestones!

• We recovered TWO million pounds of food this program year

• We have grown to more than TWO hundred FRN chapters across the US

To keep the momentum going, we have TWO ways you can catapult us to 222 chapters by June 30!

• Donate $22 to support our food recovery efforts

  • Consider making your $22 donation a recurring gift!

• Tag two friends on social media who go to school or are alumni of schools not yet in FRN’s network (check out our list of chapters here)

Shout out to Julius Caesar for creating the 12 month calendar based on the solar year in 45 BC, which brought us to this year’s epic Twosday. And thank YOU for supporting FRN to get to this latest milestone!