A glimpse into my past.

I’m often asked about my leadership style, my career path and what led me to want to join Food Recovery Network. It might sound cliche, but I am always truly humbled when people ask me about my journey. I’m humbled to just first and foremost interact with curious people because I carry around in my brain a lot of questions about everything, to have similar questions posed to me is just, well, humbling.

The reason I’ve chosen to share now.

In light of the current racial reckoning, it’s also been humbling that, given my particular lived experience and educational background, that people are inquiring about my leadership experience within the two identifiers that I speak to very often: being a woman and a person of color. (Being from New England is another identifier that I present very strongly as well.)

The current moment and the curiosity of others about my path is what compelled me to release a few blog posts that focus on the experiences that shaped my thinking around leadership that correspond with my 5-year anniversary at Food Recovery Network. I hope you enjoy getting to know me a bit more, and I hope we can discuss any of these topics during many of the upcoming Roundtable Talks FRN will host!

Part 1

By Regina Anderson, executive director of Food Recovery Network

I had just turned 8 years old when my family moved from Northern Massachusetts to Central Maine. I remember one very specific moment of my first introduction to the classroom of third grade students. A defining moment. Picture the stereotypical scenario of the new kid, escorted by an adult, walking into a classroom of students engaged in any number of activities. 

The teacher or vice principal gently pushes the student into the room as they say, “everyone meet so and so, your new classmate.” For me, in my new kid moment, after the introduction, someone in the room snickered. In an instant, a major coming of age moment occurred. Up until that point, what had been an unknown, unconscious, unarticulated set of experiences, inchoate comprehensions solidified into an understanding that had never fully expressed itself before.

In this instant, with that snicker, my brain took stock of several things at once and articulated back to me the following: that snicker may have been just a not-so-welcomed response to the new kid, because while I had never experienced being the new kid, I’d been in situations where a new kid was introduced and I understood how that might feel. 

My brain understood that coming from Massachusetts to Maine, standing before everyone in full view, that my style of dress (if you can call how we dress at such a young age “style”) was so different from everyone else’s. But, my brain landed on one thing in particular: that most likely, that snicker was produced in response to my skin color.

And in my life, my skin color had never occurred to me before, but was now in stark display, revealed by that snicker. I knew it wasn’t about anything except that. Now, of course, there is no way of definitively saying if that was what was really going on. This particular kind of memory is not provable to be true or false, just that it happened, and that it mattered to me in the coming of age moment that was the first time in my life I felt like an “other.”

And, that memory, like the other ones I had already collected before it, would collect after it to create a whole host of human experiences are a large part shaping the person I am today.