It took about 30 months into my tenure as the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of FRN, but on September 9, 2022 I reached a significant milestone as an FRN staffer: I participated in my first food recovery.

I am told by others who are more experienced in food recovery than me that my first recovery was impressive. Stephen and I recovered and donated over 1,200 pounds of food from the DaVita Dialysis Conference held at the Gaylord Hotel outside of Washington, D.C. This is the equivalent of almost 1,000 meals which will go to the men, women and children served by Central Union Mission. That is also nearly a one-to-one ratio of the food Central Union Mission needed to support one week of their program. Put differently, food that was otherwise going to be thrown away, less than 20 miles away, now helped feed an entire community, for an entire week. 

Once we delivered the food (and filled up their freezer), Central Union Mission’s Head Chef Rick immediately asked if we could come back next week, because he knew all of this food would be gone within the week. I was so happy he asked me that question, because that is exactly the type of questions I, as well as our entire network, should be asking ourselves. How can we provide consistent access to food to help our nonprofit partners have more sustainable (i.e. less funding spent on purchasing food, less food waste) practices? As the COO, it is a question I have thought a lot about since I started at FRN and the experience of recovering food gave me greater appreciation for the urgency of answering it. 

If I had not been there, this question would have likely never been passed back to me. In part because Chef Rick might have been half joking, in part because so often our nonprofit partners ask for what they need and are frequently told “no”. But it struck me that FRN has a unique opportunity to solve this question, at least for this particular partner, because they took the time to ask for what they needed. And I don’t want to be the kind of partner that doesn’t try.

Over the next year, we will be working with our network of 4,000 college students, dining service professionals, business owners, and alumni to understand what consistent access to food could look like for communities across the U.S. and how FRN could leverage our network in a different way to address this pressing need.

I am so glad I showed up, for both the food recovery and partnership beyond it.