My Data-Driven Wish Come True

Four years ago when I began my position as the inaugural Chief Operating Officer (COO) at FRN, I was delighted. I came to the organization shortly after I completed my Results Count fellowship with The Annie E. Casey Foundation.  My fellowship experience equipped me to use data to bring a cohesive vision across the programmatic, communications, and operational function areas I oversee. To learn how this work started, evolved, and how it influences our daily operations and future planning, please watch our mapping webinar, How FRN’s Data is Driving Impact. 

Through combining and analyzing six different data sets, here is what I learned about FRN’s work and how we can increase our impact:

• Community colleges are the key to our growth. It is more often community colleges, rather than four-year institutions, that are geographically located in the areas with both the most surplus food as well as the most people experiencing hunger. To help expand into community colleges, we have launched a new grant program to bring our food recovery model to neighborhoods across the U.S. Click here to learn more and apply.

• FRN must implement our programs in the areas of the most need. We believe each state presents an opportunity to reduce food waste, feed people, and fight climate change. By mobilizing 200+ college student-led chapters to recover perishable food that would otherwise go to waste from their campuses and communities and donating it to local nonprofits who feed people experiencing hunger, we have created one of the largest college student-led networks fighting food waste and hunger in the U.S. With our ability to quickly replicate in any area where a four-year higher institution is present, we created a list of all 50 states and the specific area we would start a chapter, within each state, in order to feed more people of the most need, faster. 

The areas listed below were prioritized using a variety of factors including, but not limited to: number of higher education institutions in a given area who generate surplus food (NCES, EPA), greatest need as defined by the difference between the median wage (U.S. Census) and living wage (MIT), number of people experiencing food insecurity (Feeding America), SNAP, food insecurity, and poverty rates (U.S. Census), presence of higher education institutions (NCES), and areas where the population is predominantly people of color (U.S. Census).

States listed below are in alphabetical order.

If you are interested in hosting a Lunch and Learn for your organization to see your individual area, please contact programs@foodrecoverynetwork.org.

Recap of Food Recovery Network's March Roundtable Talk

Gratitude to everyone who attended and listened to the March 2024 Roundtable Talk. We appreciate your time. And for those of you who’ve yet to hear directly from us about the halfway point of our 2024 program year, can I encourage you to find some time to listen to the recording of our biannual Roundtable Talk?

The conversation refamiliarized everyone with FRN’s longstanding vision to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S., and reiterated the scope of our work to achieve that vision. This biannual conversation celebrates the accomplishments of Food Recovery Network’s efforts at the halfway point of our program year, of which there were many. Importantly though, our conversation highlighted the difficulty of that work within a system designed to make access to food and economic security difficult. To feed everyone who is hungry, we cannot look away at what makes us uncomfortable, and we cannot assume there is nothing that can be done. Food Recovery Network is making tremendous progress every day, and we need you to stick with us and bring others along.

Can I encourage all of you to share this blog post and recording link with others who might be encouraged to know that a small and mighty national nonprofit has recovered more than 1.7 million pounds of food for those in need, in turn ensuring 2,112 metric tons of CO2 wasn’t emitted into our atmosphere only since July 2023?

Below are further reflections from the March conversation and ways for you to be involved.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM March:

• Comprehensive solutions are needed for communities to thrive. Food Recovery Network understands that within any community that is suffering from food and economic insecurity, many interventions must be developed and tried, and the communities will need parts of some interventions and sections of others to generate continued solutions to thrive.

• Developing new programmatic offerings of how to engage students beyond chapters is critical to making a meaningful impact on a community-based level. To our student leaders, thank you for your continued commitment over the last 13 years. The national office will continue to send invitations for further involvement.

• Our metrics need to reflect these learnings — we will continue to track impact beyond pounds of food recovered. We know adding our impact numbers to the collective conversation of food recovery is important to show movement. At FRN, we also want to remain fixed to the belief that all of these metrics represent our fellow humans and there is more to talk about and to know that goes beyond pounds of food recovered. We will not lose focus on the point that every meal we recover goes to a person in need, in your community, on a specific day. We will not lose focus on the point that our students go to classes, and then they convene at their campus dining kitchens, scoop and pour food into trays and bins, take the temperature and weigh that food, and then drive that precious cargo to their partner agency where they directly hand it to people they care about who will then further distribute that food to their neighbors, and then our students get back in their cars or vans and go home.
  

We have the ability to correct something that is terribly wrong in the U.S. Together, we can create consistent access to food in the ways most welcomed by communities. We can dwindle the number of neighbors experiencing food insecurity to zero. We can. Here are ways you can be involved:

• Who do you know who’s not heard of Food Recovery Network? Send them this post with a message of love, “I thought you should know about Food Recovery Network.” To change the process from food waste to food recovery we need more chapters to start and more businesses to design food recovery plans.

• Join us in April for virtual Power Hours to directly support thousands of pounds of food being recovered! It’s 60 minutes well lived, I promise!

• Your financial contributions directly support our efforts to feed more people, faster. We are grateful for any sized contribution.

I would like to take a moment of reflection for the 7 World Central Kitchen aid workers who lost their precious lives in April trying to provide food to those in need within a desperate conflict zone. They lost their precious lives trying to help, and they will be forever connected to their humanity. To date, WCK provided more than 1,700 trucks of assistance in the conflict zone.

Recap of Food Recovery Network’s September 2023 Roundtable Talk

Thank you to everyone who joined us in September for our 7th Roundtable Talk since we began hosting these conversations in July 2020. For those of you who were not able to attend,and for those of you who would like continued access to the information, below is a recap of the conversation and a link to the entire Roundtable Talk.

If you are unfamiliar with our Roundtable Talks, to understand more about what our Roundtable Talks are, why we host them, and what we cover during these biannual conversations, please read this short primer, “What are FRN’s Roundtable Talks.”

The summer Roundtable Talk journeys across two key points in time. First, we discuss progress towards our established goals (also called metrics) for the entirety of our just concluded program year, which runs from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023. Second, we announce our new goals for this current program year that kicked off on July 1,2023. Dispersed throughout the telling of that journey—across analyzing our progress and announcing our new goals—we describe in detail why we were able to accomplish what we did, where there have been difficulties or if the work has been accomplished at a different pace than expected, and importantly, our key takeaways that inform how we chart our pathway for this year.

The analysis and key learnings have accumulated over more than a decade of food recovery efforts to be sure. We are experts in recovering food, and we are dogged about ending hunger forever. In particular, our feedback loop mechanism, built into the strategic framework we launched in 2020, FRN10X, allows FRN to make better decisions based on what our data is telling us, including how the locations in the U.S. afflicted with the highest rates of food insecurity are not the same locations where there is an abundance of surplus food. It is in those locations of food insecurity that our data is telling us we must work alongside communities as much as our resources will allow to literally drive the surplus food in ways that make sense for the communities

Key Takeaways from September:

Though we concluded the Roundtable Talk with our key takeaways, I think it’s important to start with them now to act as a lens with which you can see how we accomplished all that we set out to do, and where we’re forging ahead for this year.

• Cross-sector partnership is essential. As the saying goes, if you want to go fast, go solo, if you want to go farther, go together. We have achieved our success when we partner with aligned groups and individuals. Every single metric requires partnership and when we can spend more time with funders and stakeholders who want to achieve what our framework has set out, as you will see from our results, we are able to do more.

• The toll of routine community disinvestment harms all of us. That makes both human and financial capital required for community change. We talk at great length about our mapping work in this Roundtable Talk, and we will have more dedicated time specifically to the maps we are designing. Our “mapping work,” has been a 2 years long journey bringing together a variety of data-sets from the EPA, Feeding America, location mapping and other data sets such as the MIT living wage. What our data is telling us is that of the 3,144 counties (including DC), in only about 100 of these counties is the average income a living wage income. This is abominable. This means people are suffering way more than the defined poverty line would have us believe. We will persist until the 34 million people who are currently food insecure, are economically secure.

Our accomplishments July 1, 2022 - June 30, 2023:

We surpassed our goals of recovering food and recruiting new chapters (welcome new chapters! Thank you for your efforts!). These are hard tangibles that demonstrate our capacity to recover and donate surplus food to nonprofits on the frontlines helping our community members in need. That’s the first column. The second column demonstrates our work toward wider impact. Recovering food and donating that food is our bedrock work. To end hunger forever, we must understand the impact of our work on the communities. What works for them to access food and what do they need to increase the flow of food? That is where we want to help. And for the student leaders we serve, it is important to deepen authentic relationships with them as they conduct our bedrock work and show up with us in our advocacy efforts to end hunger forever.

Further, together:

When polled, the majority of people tuning in stated they had never attended a Roundtable Talk before. Perhaps reading this now, you haven’t either. I invite you all to become familiar with the knowledge, data, takeaways and celebrations we’ve summarized during our Roundtable Talks. In his book, Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck wrote, “looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas, when it happened, it was one day hooked on to the tail of another.” That is just like the work of FRN, hooked onto the tail of our creation in 2011 - the moment we recovered 1 million pounds of food, one carload of food at a time in 2015; when we replaced our fellowship program that did not pay a living wage with permanent, full-time jobs that do pay a living wage; when we launched our audacious strategic framework and said, with this blueprint, FRN is publicly putting forward our unique contribution to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the United States. Big or small, you are needed in these efforts. Here are our current program goals and ways you can be involved so that we achieve these goals this year and come ever closer to our larger result.

Announcing FRN’s July 1, 2023-June 30, 2024 Impact Goals:

You are invited to be part of the effort:

• Start an FRN chapter in the priority states: We will bring on 20-30 new chapters this program year and our desire is to have as many chapters as possible to increase the flow of food into communities. And, with our current mapping refinement, we know that the states of California, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania have the greatest opportunity to support communities. You can start a chapter if you are a current higher ed student, alum, faculty member or if you just know someone in one of those roles you can introduce us to them.

• Monetary support ensures we can be where we need to when we need to be there: Please make a donation to FRN. All of our budgets are different and honestly, every dollar counts to allow FRN to show up for recoveries. Many of our large-scale recoveries, where we can recover large volumes of food, are not funded at all. Your donation can help us to feed more people. If a donation is not in your budget, please know we truly understand and thank you everyone for considering.

• Follow us on our social media channels to stay updated and inspired! @FoodRecovery

What are FRN's Roundtable Talks?

A brief history of FRN’s strategic framework and Roundtable Talks

In July 2020, Food Recovery Network made public our strategic framework that we called FRN10X. This framework, FRN10X, is a blueprint, our vision for how FRN plans to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S.* We said three years ago the efforts necessary to change our culture of throwing food away, to recovering surplus food and donating it, would be tremendous—tremendous, but not impossible. We said three years ago no one organization alone could achieve this cultural transformation, that we have to work together to go farther. We said then that FRN’s model and data-driven approach is a critical lever in producing the desired shift towards food recovery and economic security for those experiencing hunger and food insecurity, and our results to date that I’ll discuss in more detail below, have shown that we are making progress.

And importantly, with the launch of FRN10X, we said, in order to go farther together, we wanted to keep everyone in our network updated on our progress.To ensure we kept our progress transparent and accessible to anyone who is interested, as part of the launch of FRN10X, we also started hosting our biannual Roundtable Talks. The Talks are an opportunity for FRN to discuss the progress on our yearly goals and how those yearly goals roll up to our blueprint, our strategic framework, our bigger vision: to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S. No matter how familiar you are with the work of FRN, how knowledgeable you are about food insecurity or the effects on our planet due to the harm caused by wasting food, or to what level of engagement you are involved, we felt it was important to bring as many people together to update them on our progress in a space of knowledge, feedback and idea sharing.

FRN10X explained

*If you’d like to learn more about our FRN10x Framework, please visit our blogpost.

What do we cover during Roundtable Talks?

For the past three years, twice a year, we have hosted our Roundtable Talk discussions as an offering of understanding of what it takes for FRN to feed more people, faster, with our current resources; some of those resources being people, monetary contributions and data.

Summer

Our summer Roundtable Talk focuses on two aspects: a recap of our previous program year and the announcement of our goals for the current program year. Our program year concludes in late June. We restate the goals we had set at the beginning of the program year, and then discuss in detail how we accomplished those goals: what worked, where we are seeing promise, and where we might need to do things differently in the moment, to pivot, and what pivoting might look like for us. Importantly, we highlight our key learnings from doing the work, so that we can accelerate progress to feed more people, or discontinue efforts if they don’t make sense for FRN.

After we overview the previous program year, since we are also in our new program year, we launch a new set of goals for the current program year. These goals, which we call metrics, are formulated based on our key learnings, programmatic momentum, understanding what our data is telling us, and where we have connections to replicate and/or expand upon our work.

Winter

Our winter Talk focuses on our progress towards our goals during the current program year. By the time of our winter Talk, the program year is about halfway through, or, said another way, there is another half year left to achieve our goals. With a critical discernment of our work, we tell everyone our progress, and importantly, our analysis of why we are at where we are. A new program year means we are piloting new initiatives based on our data, or delving deeper into existing programs. We are also continually refining our data-sets and producing new concept papers, all to be applied with our singular focus to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S.

What this means for you

After each Roundtable Talk conversation, we have a written recap that discusses our latest Talk with a link to the video conversation. All our past Roundtable Talks can be found on our website. We hope you read the recap, and listen to the recording if you have a moment or two. No matter your level of engagement, our hope is that you know without a doubt that we are inviting you to be part of this effort in any way that makes sense to you. We need your help, big or small, to make FRN’s vision a reality.

Six months in, 6 months to go: FRN’s FY23 Program Year of learning into action

The 2022-2023 Food Recovery Network program year has been saturated with deep learning that has developed into meaningful community impact and a significant next iteration of our mapping work. These combined will allow us to focus ever clearer on our vision to recover surplus food to feed everyone who is hungry in the U.S.

I invite you to listen to the recording of the March 2023 Roundtable Talk because it offers several ways to connect to the work of Food Recovery Network, whether you are deeply familiar with FRN or if you’ve just now discovered us. Below I offer an overview of the progress FRN has made on our four key impact goals for the program year: recover 2 million pounds of food; recruit 20-30 new student chapters; expand our organizational impact metrics including the maps, financial support back into the community, and volunteer hours committed; and create deeper connections with our students and stakeholders. Additionally, it’s important that overlaid, underlaid, and interwoven into the success of our current program year are critical learnings that shape how we show up, how we support our students, and how we authentically work with communities in locations where we don’t live.

Goal 1: Recover 2 million pounds of food resulting in 1.6 million meals donated to individuals experiencing hunger and 880 metric tons of CO2 emissions prevented

Result: Since July 2022, FRN has recovered 1,273,987 pounds of surplus food from farms, campuses, and other food businesses, the equivalent of 1,061,656 meals donated and 561.06 metric tons of CO2 emissions prevented.

👏 Through a global pandemic that rocked us all, our students have remained steadfast and committed. They’ve always been, in my own words, “cool people,” and the pandemic didn’t alter that one bit. 88% of our FRN chapters are engaging in food recovery on their campuses and/or in their communities. This activity level is up from 79% last year. Along with food recovery, our student chapters also activate through advocacy work and community engagement initiatives, with nearly half (46%) of our chapters engaging in more than one way within their communities. We will continue to update our Advocacy page on our website to keep everyone updated between Roundtable Talks on our advocacy work. Be sure to also follow us on social media to see our incredible chapters in action in their communities across the U.S.

Goal 2: Expand organizational impact metrics, including further refinement of our maps, resources back into the community, financial support, and volunteer hours.

Result: Between July - December 2022, our FRN student chapters volunteered 7,464 hours, the equivalent value of $223,546.80 per Independent Sector’s Value of Volunteer Time.

🍏 The last 18 months of pilot programming in Atlanta, GA and Irvine, CA helped deepen and refine our understanding of the best ways FRN can feed more people faster, and offered new opportunities to engage our students, with the deeper engagement of student leaders being one of our four programmatic goals. The pilots also allowed us to further another goal of expanding our organizational metrics. Or, to say it another way, we wanted to understand the impact of our work in a community beyond pounds of food recovered and the equivalent meals donated and CO2 diverted. We understood that our being in communities made them better, but what could we say about why or how? Our time in Atlanta and Irvine allowed us to collect and analyze data on additional metrics that deepen our understanding of the true impact of this work. For example, one new metric is how much financial support is being put back into the communities where we work. Direct financial support in a community means a stronger community. And by tracking our time in the community, we can talk about the value of the work.

✨ We also became very aware that honoring our commitment to support communities in the ways that they would like means that the work unfurls much slower than even our most conservative of estimates given factors that are unique to that area, such as growing seasons, or understanding cultural norms that may act as barriers to feeding more people faster, as we discovered in Irvine. Spoiler: we were able to identify the would-be cultural barrier, work within that reality, and develop a community-based solution that allowed for the increased flow of food access.

🗺️ Further refinement of our mapping work meant talking to a lot of data scientists, academic supporters, and other thought partners. It is because of this painstaking work that FRN believes that when we take into consideration the economic security of the people within the U.S., we must look at a living wage (and when we say a living wage, what we mean is wages that allow us to pay for our housing, transportation, food, clothing, child and medical care for ourselves and our dependents, that is a living wage). When we consider MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, we understand that 3,073 out of 3,141 counties in the U.S. do not earn a living wage to be able to consistently afford food, housing, and other basic needs. This is a staggering number, and when faced with this reality we steadied ourselves with the belief that, as James Baldwin reminds us, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Within the FRN network, we intend to continue producing impact that is our unique contribution to ensuring the economic security of the 34 million people who are food insecure right now.

Goal 3: Recruit 20-30 new FRN student-led chapters, 50% of those being in FRN’s 10 target states with the highest rates of food insecurity and food waste.

WELCOME to our 17 new chapters! 5 of these new chapters are within our original 10 target states. Together, FRN currently has 193 student-led chapters across the US!

We still have so much more we can do together for the rest of the 2023 program year and beyond. Here are a few things to keep in mind, ways you can be involved, and importantly, ways you can ask others to join you too.

🎓 The Student Loan Forgiveness Plan was introduced by the Biden-Harris Administration. Food Recovery Network supports this Plan and will work with national partners to promote the need for this Plan to be implemented because it is directly related to the economic security of everyone we serve.

🥕 We will continue our educational campaign to support anyone who is hesitant about starting a food recovery program at their business or for their conferences or events. The passage of the Food Donation Improvement Act is intended to increase access to food for the 34 million people who are food insecure. We will leverage this federal law to encourage more people to do the right thing with their surplus food.

Goal 4: Create deeper connections with student leaders and stakeholders by convening through Student Town Halls, gleaning initiatives, community college outreach, and food recovery work.

Result: We’ve continued to engage students and stakeholders through both virtual and in person opportunities such as large-scale food recovery events, virtual advocacy interviews, and conversations on equity.

💰 Volunteering is a time commitment that not all students can take on. FRN understands the challenges our students confront each and every day. That is why we fight for the minimum wage to increase to $15 an hour—at least $15. This would also increase the baseline federal work study pay offered to students. FRN will also continue to hire and pay a living wage to our student leaders to participate in projects above and beyond their chapter volunteer efforts.

🍎 As I mentioned earlier, our work in Atlanta and Irvine has taught us how to best support communities the way they want us to. We’ve replicated our gleaning initiatives in Irvine, CA and have hosted 6 events with local stakeholders that resulted in 13,000 pounds of fresh produce gleaned and donated back to the community. We’ll be back in Irvine in early April for another gleaning event!

🎉 After 18 months of learning through piloting in Atlanta, for the first time we’ve piloted a program that the Atlanta community has resoundingly told us they would like to continue! Last fall, we hosted 5 free fresh food pop-up markets at a local elementary school where children and families could pick the produce they would like. All of the produce was gorgeous, fresh, and free. On average, we served about 115 families 20 pounds of food per week. After just 5 weeks there, we had a waitlist of three additional schools who wanted us to host markets at their locations! Starting in April, FRN staff, student leaders and volunteers will be back in Atlanta hosting free pop up markets at local elementary schools.

🏈 February saw our biggest one-time recovery of this program year at the Bullseye Event Group Players Tailgate before the Super Bowl. This was the third time FRN was able to support this event. With student volunteers from the Northern Arizona University FRN chapter, we recovered 2,907 pounds of surplus food, the equivalent of 2,423 meals donated to the local community and $7,317 of resources put back into the community.

THANK YOU to everyone who listened in during our Roundtable Talk and asked wonderful questions. We saw a lot of new people attend this Talk and look forward to getting to know all of you. Please stay in touch between now and our fall Roundtable Talk. We need your ideas, considerations and questions to continue to feed more people, faster.

Additional ways to support our work:

💸 Donate to FRN to sustain our movement and help us fight food waste and feed people → your support means we can feed more people faster.

💌 Sign up for our newsletter to get regular updates on FRN happenings.

✏️ Sign up for a Power Hour virtual volunteering opportunity. These are wildly fun and a great way to support our work.

📢 Tell a “FRNd” → Do you know,or are you a college student? A food business professional? Encourage…yourself…them to join a chapter or start a food recovery program!