Our latest feedback loop learning on our strategic framework

As a continued commitment to Food Recovery Network’s public learning approach and stakeholder engagement feedback loop, based on our latest conversation about our strategic framework, FRN10X, I wanted to provide our latest key takeaways. The takeaways are based on our latest sections of our FRN10X work from October 2020 to February 2021. We asked those in attendance to answer the question (and answer as many times as they wanted, even after the presentation on social media!) What does a just and equitable food system look like to you? I again invite those of you reading this post to continue to answer this question and tell us on any social media platform with which you interact with FRN. In the meantime, please read our latest takeaways from all of you.

• There is food to recover. Twenty-five percent of our chapters are currently recovering surplus food. That 25% of recovering chapters were able to recover the same amount of surplus food as 25% of our movement recovered before the pandemic. The amount of food did not decrease and reminds us all, there continues to be surplus food, though it may be located at different places within the food system.

• Disproportionate adoption across programs. At FRN, we offer several programs and ways to engage our network. There was a lot of excitement and approval of those offerings from our stakeholders. However, adoption across those offerings has varied. Luckily there has been high adoption on certain aspects of the work that will allow us to dig in at the appropriate level of engagement and also offerings that did not receive as much engagement as we had anticipated based on the encouraging feedback from stakeholders. We will also evaluate the offerings that did not receive much engagement to stop those offerings, or alter them into different programs. This is critical learning to ensure FRN can meet the needs and interest of our students and alums with an adaptable approach.

  • We will keep you updated! During our latest presentation on FRN10X, we asked all attendees how they most wanted to interact with FRN: To be informed, to act as consultants and/or to act as partners, the majority of people said they wanted to be informed.

  • We continue to be adaptive. FRN is moving into areas of work within the food system and programming that we’ve not before. Entering into these new spaces means we have to be very clear that the work in which we are engaged are pilots. We have hypotheses on the work, but we really need to engage in the work, see what happens, and analyze why programs shape up the way they do, and from there we will need to analyze critically as we move forward.

• When we asked our stakeholders What does a just and equitable food system look like to you,  some of the recurring themes we heard were access to culturally appropriate foods and access to enough calories were part of the vision for that food system.

• People are responding very positively to our commitment to public learning!

Thank you all for your interaction with our strategic framework, FRN10X. Please continue to share your thoughts with us. Be on the lookout for our next Roundtable Talk summer 2021.

Women of Color, Leadership and Food

On May 10, 2021, I had the honor of talking to two incredible women who are both leaders in their own right, and who both work in food from very different places of pursuit. Sharing stories, perspectives and expertise from people of different backgrounds is one way to bring equity into our lives. Who has an opportunity to share their voice? Are we hearing stories that expand our understanding, not just affirming assumptions? 

The two women leaders, Perteet Spencer and Leonisa Johnson shared their backgrounds and how they apply their skills and knowledge to their respective roles as a co-founder of a new and burgeoning food brand dedicated to helping the lives of farmers in Africa and providing an opportunity for people abroad to share in the community currently unfamiliar flavors of West Africa; and as a Program Manager at a nonprofit that works with public school gardens as a way to share experiences with young students to equip them with tools to begin to apply their own learnings to make choices around food and also to begin to question systems and situations in their communities. The goal of this conversation is to help widen our aperture of thought, and to be inspired by these incredible leaders hailing from Chicago and New York City.

Image: Perteet Spencer

Perteet: We started AYO to build a more inclusive grocery store that represented the ingredients and flavors of West Africa that we have enjoyed as a family.

Food is a form of cultural expression and provides a unique opportunity for people to expand their worldview. We are excited to have the opportunity to spotlight foods that have been historically marginalized through building the AYO brand. At AYO, we also believe that we have a personal responsibility to enrich the communities that inspired our products – we bring this to life through thoughtful sourcing and broader community partnerships.

Image: Leonisa Johnson

Leonisa: In urban areas, young people are often told about healthy eating from people who do not look like them. I have the opportunity to talk with students, to educate and provide experience, and from there, they do the hard work of starting to question other, larger topics. It allows young people to begin to think of and work towards different outcomes for themselves. I help to uplift what is already in the community that is working without the assumption that people have nothing. They work hard to present the food they put on their tables, and they take pride in what that food says about them. Access is a voice.


Watch the full conversation below –

Thank you to Perteet and Leonisa for your time and your story sharing. Perteet is venturing into a space that maybe we don’t often see people of color going, and Leonisa is preparing more young people to enter into those spaces at a young age so that by the time they are ready, seeing more people of color in roles not often open to them will be normalized for this next generation.

Building Better Nonprofits

On Thursday, April 29, I had the honor of speaking with three individuals who I respect deeply for their insights within their fields. Our topic was Building Better Nonprofits. Our conversation centered around our current moment interacting with the nonprofit sector and how this moment affects those in the sector. Together, we discussed how we can and how we are building a better nonprofit sector that is intentionally equitable, that is centered on radical healing, and not centered on our own fragility. Below is a takeaway among many takeaways from our conversation. I encourage you to listen to the full conversation. I also encourage you to follow each of these incredible people and the organizations within which they do their work.

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Image: Dr. Arnold

Dr. Kristy Arnold (@AskDrKMA) – Radical humility means being intentional. We are not doing things out of history and habit because that can reinforce supremacist values. Being intentional means driving from the driver's seat and setting a strategic plan that is authentic to the work you are trying to achieve and checking your organization often to ensure the mission is aligned with how the work is being done. Also, culture needs to be intentionally created and if your organization doesn't do that work, a culture will be created, it just may not be the one you want.

Image: Mr. Reuler

Ben Reuler (@SeattleWorks) – Dismantling racism as a white person involves embracing discomfort and conflict, things that don’t often come naturally. Self-compassion and self-love are crucial, they liberate us to shed white supremacy cultural norms including perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, and power hoarding. Dismantling racism needs to be ongoing, in perpetuity, so having grace with ourselves will allow us to sustain for the long haul, and to weather haters and detractors along the way.

Image: Dr. Bishop

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop (@DrBishopDigital) – Tension and burnout far preceded the pandemic. And, how do we want to consider the self-care that was necessary before the pandemic while in the pandemic? We as people who are serving others need to serve ourselves first and not feel like that is selfish and define how we bring ourselves to this work as our full, best selves. What does this actually look like in practice at all points within our organization and the people we interact with at all levels? Keywords – trauma-informed, healing-centered, transparency to the messiness that this kind of approach produces and not as something to run away from.

We are in this together. Conversations like the one I had with Dr. Arnold, Ben and Dr. Bishop help us all to widen our aperture of understanding, patience and seeing systems that are not helping everyone. When we can see the harmful systems so clearly, when we have the tools to help one another before we help those in our community, we truly can build better nonprofits.

Resiliency is a device to make positive change

In his book, How Children Succeed, Paul Tough makes the argument that academic achievement is an indicator of later success in one’s life, and an indicator to which we give a lot of stock. However, characteristics such as perseverance, self-control and curiosity are better indicators of a person’s ability to navigate through a complex world filled with achievements, happiness and with setbacks, uncertainty and to be pointed, with tragedy.

I grew up in a working poor family. For many, when you grow up in a household where there just are not enough resources to accommodate a comfortable life, setbacks, uncertainty and tragedy are not absorbed as readily as they can be in families that have more structures to accommodate these life situations. To compensate for these consistent stresses and pressure that all families experience, unknown to me, I began to develop deep channels of resiliency and tenacity in my early childhood that is now part of my DNA. Resilience and tenacity became the device that helped me absorb and comprehend problems. Resilience, tenacity was interwoven with other characteristics from my upbringing including a fierce work ethic I observed from my parents. Both of my parents worked long shifts, they worked double shifts, they worked for long stretches of time without a day off to try to make their ends meet for our family and that ethic became my own. Throughout my life, I also fostered curiosity and a general sense of optimism, along with my deep desire for academic pursuit. These characteristics, natural and inculcated, lighted my personal path that led me to become the Executive Director of Food Recovery Network.

Like anyone, many amazing things happened to me during the course of my life that occurred because I worked my butt off (hi undergraduate and graduate degree, I’m looking at you!), and occurred through sheer luck and any combination of those two. I work at Food Recovery Network, and I’ve dedicated my career to the nonprofit sector because I want to minimize the deleterious effects of poverty on children. I want people to be the full panoply of themselves like so many are able to do when their families have the resources to allow themselves and their children to flourish. At FRN, that starts with a meal. In the richest country, the world has ever known, as we currently define that, a meal in the US should be the easiest connection point to our humanity and to nature. When you have a nutritious meal, you can concentrate, you have the energy to play and to absorb setbacks more easily as they come, as they will for all of us.

I’ll talk more about resilience and tenacity in upcoming posts because there is so much to discuss how those characteristics play out in our daily lives, and how, for me, allowed me to become the person I am today, fighting for equality.

Gold’s Gladiators for Good

Marshall is a very small community of approximately 13,000 people with a poverty rate of 19.8%. This small town is home to Missouri Valley College (MVC). MVC offers a Humanities class also known as Nonprofit Leadership Alliance (NLA). This is a student-led club where you volunteer and get involved in the community. This is led by Professor Jamie Gold, who is a very active member of the Marshall community. 

Joining the Food Recovery Network and addressing the hunger in the local community has been something Jamie Gold had envisioned for a long time. With her vision and dedicated students, Missouri Valley became an official FRN chapter during the Spring of 2019. The MVC Food Recovery Chapter partnered with Fresh Ideas which is the cafeteria on campus. Fresh Ideas has always been a supporter and willing to help MVC FRN Chapter in any way possible.

Mission Possible:

While 2020 was full of obstacles for everyone, the MVC FRN chapter utilized this time to grow so they could operate at a larger level. During this time, they were able to secure a grant and now operate out of their very own building. The building has allowed the MVC FRN Chapter to take their recoveries and package them into individual meals using the food sealer. Prior to the building, the food was packaged in the cafeteria and then distributed. With having a building they are able to store the meals on-site. 

Image: MVC-FRN Chapter new packaging

Additionally, the annual Silent Auction was held virtually for the 2020 year. While the fundraiser looked different than the prior year, it was still very successful. During the 2019 school year the Trivia Night and Silent Auction, the MVC FRN Chapter raised $7,000.00. Due to the pandemic, there was no Trivia Night. Even without the Trivia Night $4,000.00 was still raised. One of the big items was a signed Travis Kelce football!  Proceeds from the fundraisers were used to address hunger in the community.

Image: Steven Sims President of NLA and Savannah Land President of MVC-FRN Chapter loading food from a recovery

Where we are today:

NLA has established strong relationships in the community especially with their food partner Fresh Ideas and their distribution partner Missouri Valley Community Action Agency. Without the partnerships and the support of the community, NLA would not be able to fill the plates for 50 families every week. They are able to store food on-site as well as seal individual meals using their food sealer. 

Image: Savannah Land FRN President using the food sealer to seal the food recovered

On February 14th, the FRN chapter recovered 222 pounds of food in 2 weeks’ time, which is equivalent to 180 sealed trays! The President of the MVC chapter is Savannah Land who describes the food sealer as a “game-changer!” The chapter also does online engagements such as “Sampling with Steven.” This is a time where NLA President Steven samples a food item that they have recovered and gives it a thumbs up or down. So far Steven has had great things about the items they have recovered! 

We are now 3 months into the 2021 year and MVC Food Recovery Chapter has already recovered 820 pounds of food! That is 820 pounds of food that would have ended up in the landfill, but instead is going to feed people experiencing hunger in the community. Thanks to the support of community partners, the MVC Food Recovery Chapter is working to address hunger in the community. If you are ever in Marshall you can find NLA operating out of 166 Court Street in Marshall, MO. You can also follow them on social media:

• Facebook: MVC Non-Profit Leadership Alliance

• Instagram: @mvc_nonprofit