For the past year and a half Gaylord National Resort in Washington DC has supported a food recovery effort as part of hosting their large events. They’ve made room in their kitchens for extra refrigeration and space to store extra food packaging. The Gaylord staff take time after each event to carefully and safely package surplus food to store for our Food Recovery Network team to pick up and deliver to area hunger-fighting partners. The process has changed their workflow from managing food waste to food recovery to benefit their neighborhood.
The consistency of the program has made a significant impact on the community. Gaylord has been able to redirect the equivalent of over 60,000 meals to seven area nonprofits on the front lines of helping to provide food for individuals experiencing hunger. Those nonprofits are involved in helping individuals improve their lives by providing a safe place to sleep, finding permanent housing opportunities, employment, family support, and more. It’s been food the organizations can count on regularly—adjusting budgets to use finances on other needed items and staffing. This means more food is on hand in their freezer when demand is high. All of the resources required to produce those meals have also been saved—including the water used to grow and prepare the food, as well as the labor, fuel, and time required for its cultivation, transportation, and cooking. Instead of the food being tragically wasted in a landfill—where it would generate excess CO2 and directly contribute to climate change—this food was put to good use; it was eaten. From a sustainability perspective, Gaylord National has mitigated nearly 50 tons of CO2e emissions—the equivalent of driving 11 passenger vehicles for a year with no destination and no purpose.
CORPORATE COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Corporate support of employee community involvement, such as volunteering, or programs like Gaylord National’s, has long been an effective way for companies to engage their staff in meaningful activities that benefit the communities where they operate. Corporations let us know that they want to do more than just donate financially; they want to be involved. Often - those community-based opportunities take the form of a single day of volunteering for their staff. Days like Martin Luther King Jr Day, Thanksgiving, and the winter holidays are all popular volunteer times for everyone. These can vary in size and must be scheduled within specific timeframes. While these events provide valuable opportunities, they also come with significant costs for the nonprofit involved. They can create a vacuum of volunteering during the spring and summer when the need for support is still high. Unless a nonprofit is financially stable or compensated by the corporation, hosting such events can be overwhelming, requiring considerable time and resources, all while hoping that the return on investment justifies the effort.
Large-scale, one-time volunteer engagements can provide some benefits. Food Recovery Network hosts several events each year, resulting in large volumes of food being recovered. Getting to the level of organizational ease to run these events took a tremendous amount of funding and time over several years. However, more can be done. Corporations can benefit from the knowledge that a consistent presence and regular involvement are much more beneficial to non-profits of all sizes. I’d even extend this sentiment a bit further—the reason the nonprofits work hard to make that one-day volunteering event work is because of the relationship they are building and, in my experience, the hope of what the conversion into a long-term partnership can accomplish.
Building a relationship - committing to weekly support, partnering to use corporate resources to solve systemic issues - a nonprofit can use those hours and funds strategically to help create long-term change, which leads to transformation.
FOOD RECOVERY - A TRANSFORMATIONAL WAY TO DEEPEN COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
Food recovery is not the norm in the United States; in fact, food waste is alarmingly common. In 2022 alone, 38% of the total food supply went uneaten or unsold, amounting to 235 million tons of food that could have been redistributed to the 44 million people experiencing hunger and food insecurity in the country. Food is also the number one item found in landfills across the United States. So how can we make food recovery of surplus food the norm instead of the exception?
One key step is to expand how corporations structure their community involvement. Corporate cafeterias nationwide could implement recovery programs similar to successful models already in place. Just one day of food recovery can translate into more food for people experiencing hunger in the same communities and regions where those companies have a presence while preventing precious resources from ending up in landfills. Nonprofit organizations that receive this food could consistently depend on a higher volume of food donations.
People frequently approach my organization, expressing interest in helping with food recovery. However, when they learn that moving thousands of pounds of food typically requires only 1 to 3 people and takes about one hour, they often decline, citing availability issues since recoveries are usually scheduled during the day. Our existing food recovery model thrives precisely because college students and the FRN national staff can participate during “odd” hours, sometimes with little notice.
For example, if corporations created a lunch volunteer program, one or two staff members could recover surplus food, deliver it to a nearby nonprofit, and return to work quickly. The staff would feel amazing for helping out, the DINING staff would feel amazing for not having to toss out their hard-earned work of making the food, the local community benefits, and if they wanted to, the corporation could also receive tax benefits from doing their good deed.
Additionally, our organization has established three free fresh produce markets in the United States. If nearby corporations could store our materials (such as tables, banners, baskets, and gloves - they really do not take up that much space) at their offices and help us set up the market, they could create a consistent free produce market by working in shifts of 3-10 people for two hours. Even just the storage of items would alleviate the expense of precious funds to pay for storage - it would alleviate FRN staff time and create more efficiency.
In both scenarios, it’s essential to recognize that the amount of food redistributed is not in the millions of pounds at once. (Luckily, so many incredible organizations focus on doing just that.) Instead, food in these scenarios is distributed in quantities that meet the immediate needs of localized areas experiencing hunger. This means working with organizations such as homeless shelters, Title I schools, domestic violence houses or churches. For example, these locations might need 10 trays of prepared food rather than 10,000 or 5 pallets of apples and tomatoes instead of 500. The goal is to open up more avenues for food access until all surplus food is consistently routed into our communities in ways that make food access easier for them.
If a smaller percentage of employees have direct involvement in this type of community activation, companies can educate their teams about their food recovery efforts and help employees understand the need to end food waste in general. We offer lunch and learn opportunities for any company that wants to learn more about food recovery and how people can get involved in the movement.
Many companies have already participated in Day of Service opportunities to honor Dr. King, and I encourage them to continue doing so. Large-scale volunteerism does have a place, and it is necessary. However, I encourage more companies to take the time to find consistent commitments to their communities.
This is what leads to transformation: small acts consistently performed over time. And that is the kind of systemic change that honors Dr. King’s legacy, in addition to upholding jobs that have dignity and fair wages—the leveraging of resources, consistently with trust that the support will be there, corporations, nonprofits, and communities can work together toward eradicating hunger altogether.