Regina Harmon
Increasing minimum wage in Kentucky can end ...

In the wake of devastation, we have an opportunity to correct a long-standing ill in Hardin County and throughout Kentucky. Like many parts of the United States, the residents of Hardin County need access to financial resources to reclaim their safety for the long term.



Increasing minimum wage in Kentucky can end hunger and increase financial security statewide.
Regina Harmon
A Celebration of Earth Month: What’s your ...
FRN Roundtable Talks
Katie Jones
My Data-Driven Wish Come True
FRN Roundtable Talks
Regina Harmon
Recap of Food Recovery Network's March ...
Food Recovery Network
Spotlight on Food Recovery Network in Las Vegas
Spotlight on Food Recovery Network in Las Vegas

White House Centers Community Leaders in Discussion on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Daniella Passariello is a senior at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the President of FRN’s student-led chapter on campus. Recently, Daniella attended the White House Challenge to End Hunger & Build Healthy Communities, an event following up on the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health last fall. Read about Daniella’s experience attending this in-person event and her insightful observations about how community leaders, like the students powering our movement, are making a difference in the fight against hunger below.

Last month, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the White House Challenge to End Hunger & Build Healthy Communities event in Washington, DC, and it was an experience that will stay with me for a long time. The White House Challenge builds upon President Biden’s goal to end hunger, reduce diet-related diseases, and reduce health disparities in the US by 2030, which was announced as part of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in September 2022. 

The event space was cozy, but the atmosphere was electric. I heard from political figures like Ambassador Susan Rice, listened to two panels moderated by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and sat in on a fireside chat with Chef José Andrés. It was enlightening to see policymakers, business representatives, nonprofit leaders, and community activists working together in real time, and to better understand how essential this collaboration is to solve the complex and intersectional issue of hunger in the U.S. 

“What struck me most about this event was hearing from community leaders...there were three panelists whose stories really resonated with me, and I’m delighted to highlight their stories here.”
— Daniella Passariello

What struck me most about this event was hearing from community leaders who have successfully built strategic partnerships within the public and private sectors to fight hunger on the ground. I found it fascinating to see the role that the government can play to uplift community leaders to create solutions that center the needs of the people they serve. In particular, there were three panelists whose stories really resonated with me, and I’m delighted to highlight their stories here.

Robert White

Board Member, Feeding Southwest Virginia

Robert White, a Board Member of Feeding Southwest Virginia, spoke about his personal experience with food insecurity and how it motivated him to make a change. Now, he is able to support Feeding Southwest Virginia’s hunger-fighting work, which includes providing hot meals to hundreds of people each day. His message was simple: "It takes a village." Robert encouraged everyone to get involved in on-the-ground solutions to make a real difference in addressing hunger. 

Donta Rose

Owner, sharswood grocery outlet

Donta Rose, the owner of Sharswood Grocery Outlet in Philadelphia, was the star of the show. He noticed what needed to be changed in his community, particularly the food desert that it had been experiencing for the past 60 years. He took it upon himself to buy and run the grocery store in Sharswood so he could increase access to fresh produce and groceries for his neighbors. His passion was so infectious that Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, another speaker on the panel, offered him support on the spot. It was truly inspiring to see how one person can make such a big impact in their community, and it was especially interesting to see the ways that passion and energy for a mission can inspire even more connections and collaborations with other partners.

Mar Mar Lin

Foodshare Advocate, hunger task force

Mar Mar Lin, a FoodShare Advocate at Hunger Task Force, was the final panelist who truly stood out to me. She spoke about the importance of connecting with the community you are working with, especially in vulnerable communities like refugee and immigrant communities. Mar Mar focuses on ensuring that food banks offer culturally appropriate food and that resources are communicated in a way that builds trust with community members. She was an essential voice on the panel, and as an immigrant myself, I was thrilled to see her there and hear her story.

“ The U.S. government should focus on catalyzing action by bringing local changemakers to the decision table and fostering a collaborative environment, and local leaders should have the support of the public and private sectors to be the decision-makers in their community. ”
— Daniella Passariello

Attending the White House Challenge event left me feeling motivated and empowered. It made me realize that grassroots movements are what will get the job done, which requires collaboration with the public and private sectors to create real change. The U.S. government should focus on catalyzing action by bringing local changemakers to the decision table and fostering a collaborative environment, and local leaders should have the support of the public and private sectors to be the decision-makers in their community.  

As college students, we have the power to make a difference in the fight against hunger and support our communities. As a member of a Food Recovery Network chapter at Georgetown University, I’m a part of the solution. Every day, I work with local partners to recover surplus food, advocate for better food and hunger policies, and spread awareness on how we can tackle food waste and food insecurity. To students aspiring to join the food recovery movement, start or join an FRN chapter on your campus!

FRN student chapter members are community leaders. When we use our voices to push for change, we can have the impact we seek. Together, we can end hunger and build healthy communities.

On Earth Day, recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ familial ties to these lands

The first Earth Day celebration was in 1970. For many people, that Earth Day marked the first time we as a nation came together to give praise to Earth for sustaining our lives. And for many of those same people, Earth Day was thought to have launched the modern environmental movement in the United States: the understanding that human practices are harming our environment and the pursuit to change how we live to be in harmony with the natural world. For me, that is certainly what I was taught and what I believed for a large part of my life.

Yes, Earth Day can be a wonderful celebration and a call to action for us to be more aware of our individual choices and impact on the environment. However, it is imperative that we go beneath this surface so that we can more fully understand the moment in which Earth Day was born. 

Looking back on this moment, we have the opportunity now to understand how Earth Day came to be, beyond the lens of a 1970s celebration that included speeches from individuals from the dominant caste, and plastic balloons and styrofoam cups, and exchanging money to actually put on the celebration. We can also better interrogate the legacy of Earth Day, born under a capitalist structure that therefore requires profitability to function. An example of this legacy is the widespread use of reusable tote bags for grocery shopping. The use of tote bags came from the desire to move away from plastic bags, which are made from petrol, a nonrenewable resource that very rarely is recycled. Tote bags were marketed as a wonderful way to stop our use of plastic bags, or at least reduce our reliance on them. Now, not only are new tote bags given away at events, parties and other gatherings, they are for sale at grocery stores for when you’ve forgotten your own tote at home for as little as $0.99. How many of us are now overrun with tote bags in our homes? Sadly, we would have to use one tote bag 7,100 times to neutralize the carbon footprint from its production, but tote bag production continues though we are overrun with them, and are just as ubiquitous as plastic bags, because it makes money.

Aaron Carapella, a self-taught mapmaker in Warner, Ok. designed this map of Native American tribes before first contact with Europeans. You can learn more about Aaron and purchase his maps here.

It’s also essential to go back in time to understand Earth Day and the modern environmental movement in the US, bringing in a new lens to center the thousands of years of stewardship of the Earth by Indigenous peoples who have always been here and who have always communed with nature as a member of their family. When many of us learned about Earth Day, many voices were intentionally excluded. This time we can relearn with a more inclusive mind, creating a richer, broader history of natural stewardship. This relearning can also promote our own trauma healing and expand and redefine our understanding of how we can truly be in communion with our natural world. We have that opportunity now.

When we look back in history and see who were in positions of power to create and utilize a large-scale platform and to engender action, we see that the environmental movement that sprung from Earth Day was led by a mostly white group of people who were not necessarily attuned with other groups sharing Earth and the United States. The same goes for many large movements in the US: women’s suffrage excluded the voices of Black women, as did the civil rights movement, though Black women were integral to the success of both movements. Those in power to create Earth Day did not seek to include the voices of Indigenous peoples, and their exclusion wasn’t even seen as troublesome at the time. In many ways, this practice of exclusion continues into the present day. Because of this history and practice, and when we look at the function of the modern environmental movement and what Earth Day represents, some people don’t want to be part of this because it doesn’t fulfill its purported purpose of supporting a better relationship with the Earth.

For many of us, we do not understand how the numerous Indigenous peoples' cultures value the Earth in different ways and how spiritually, Indigenous peoples connect to the Earth since the moment they are born. Here is an opportunity! We can further our own understanding given that many of us only learn of Native American history up to about 1900 while in school, and since that learning is often only in the context of the history of European settlers / colonizers who came to the US to start a new life. We may have learned about Earth Day as the beginning of the environmental movement, rather than as the dominant culture’s specific offering of celebration and action. Indigenous people are very much alive in the United States and they continue to hold so much knowledge of our natural world that is intrinsic to them, passed down from generation to generation dating back thousands of years. We can and should incorporate this knowledge into how we understand the Earth and our position in it.

What is so important to know is that we all have a connection to the Earth that dates back thousands of years. We may have been disconnected from that heritage as other cultural norms and stories took over, but the connection is still within us. Personally, I now know that I have Indigenous people as my ancestors, but that is all I know. I do not have passed down stories or ceremonies that connect me to that part of my life. That has been lost over time and it’s often difficult to grapple with knowing I have this within me, but no starting point to connect. I just have to keep learning and connecting in my own ways.

I recommend learning directly from Indigenous communities. First, learning anything from Indigenous communities is a gift, period. But, as it relates to our own understanding of Earth Day, learning about the natural world through their eyes is a gift. Here are a few suggestions on how to start the journey that can last a lifetime. I suggest reading:

  1. The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. This book refocuses how we think about Europeans coming to the United States hundreds of years before the “founding” of the US. Dunbar-Ortiz also offers a list of additional reading.



  2. The Red Deal by The Red Nation, a collection of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists. The book argues that Indigenous peoples, Black people, trans people and other marginalized groups did not cause the climate crisis, but if we all come together, we can avert a climate catastrophe. To do so, we must listen to the voices that have been shut out because they hold vital information and knowledge that we must all internalize and use to guide our actions. 

As I often say during workshops and presentations for Food Recovery Network, we are all on a journey of learning and where we are on that journey is different for all of us. If you have suggested readings or access to knowledge that you would like to offer, please do share!

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!

Student Leaders Step Up to Recover from the Big Game

It’s 6:00 am in Flagstaff, AZ on Sunday, February 12, 2023. It’s quiet and cold, around 30 degrees outside, and the sun isn’t up yet, but eight leaders from Food Recovery Network’s (FRN) chapter at Northern Arizona University (NAU) are awake and gearing up to drive down to Glendale, where Super Bowl LVII will take place in 10 hours. 

By 7:00 am, seven students meet their faculty advisor, settle into two cars and while the sun rises, they hit the road to avoid game day traffic on the only two-lane highway down to Glendale. They take a short pitstop at a roadside diner for breakfast and continue the 2 ½ hour drive. By 10:30 am they arrive in Glendale and make their way towards State Farm Stadium. They’ve got their game faces on, but they’re not here for football - they’re here for food recovery. 

Just across the street from State Farm Stadium, Bullseye Event Group hosts their annual Players Tailgate, a premier all-inclusive tailgating experience where guests can enjoy unlimited drinks and bites curated by high-profile chefs from across the country and mingle with current and former NFL players before they watch the big game. In preparation for the event, the culinary team purchased nearly 10,000 pounds of food to be served to guests during the 4-hour event. 

With all events of this size and scale, it’s imperative to have a plan in place to ensure any surplus food is donated. FRN student and faculty leaders understand the urgency and importance of this work, which prompted the NAU chapter to make the trip to Glendale to support FRN staff members with one of our largest food recoveries of the year. 

“It was empowering to participate in this food recovery, realizing that our chapter played such an important role in the process.”
— Fran Alvarado, NAU Campus Dining, Sodexo

On a normal school day, the students at NAU work with their faculty advisor, the campus Sustainability Director for Sodexo Dining, to donate perfectly good food that was prepared and never served from the Hot Spot, an all-you-care-to-eat resident dining hall on campus. Since reviving its food recovery program in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NAU chapter has recovered and donated 9,580 pounds of food, equivalent to 7,983 meals, to two local hunger-fighting organizations, the Flagstaff Family Food Center and Sunshine Rescue Mission. FRN staff were delighted to meet the NAU student chapter members and their advisor, who dedicate their time day in and day out to create a more sustainable and equitable food system, in Glendale for our big food recovery. 

Glendale Mayor Weiers proclaims February 12, 2023 Food Recovery Network day!

Now it’s 1:00pm and the Players Tailgate is heating up, figuratively and literally. The sun is high in the sky, chefs are serving up delectable bites, NFL players are mingling, and suddenly Glendale’s very own Mayor Weiers pays a visit. Here on official business, the Mayor invites FRN’s Executive Director, Regina Anderson, and all NAU chapter volunteers to the stage and officially proclaims Sunday, February 12, 2023, Food Recovery Network Day in Glendale, AZ!  

“It feels great to be recognized by someone in a high-profile office. To know the Mayor cares about the same things we care about—reducing waste and overcoming hunger—is encouraging. More importantly, it increases awareness of sustainability efforts and encourages others to get involved.”
— Fran Alvarado, NAU Campus Dining, Sodexo ce

As the Players Tailgate event comes to an end, football fans migrate to watch the game while FRN staff and our student volunteers suit up for our own game-time kick-off. At 4:30 pm the head chefs give our crew the green light to begin our food recovery work. Swiftly, volunteers organize into an assembly line to move food donations from a refrigerated truck into our vans for delivery to the Phoenix Rescue Mission. Many hands make light work, and within 30 minutes we pack nearly 3,000 pounds of high-quality proteins, seafood, dairy, produce, and condiments into our vehicles. 

Upon arrival at Phoenix Rescue Mission, everyone’s spirits are high. With adrenaline pumping, we quickly unload the food from our vans onto 5 palettes that are immediately placed into freezers. As Phoenix Rescue Mission announces the amount of food donated that evening, our group erupts into cheers. Our mini-celebration is filled with laughter, high-fives, compliments, and thanks all around.  

A successful food recovery of this magnitude depends on the cooperation and collaboration of many people, especially volunteers. The NAU chapter showed up and showed out for this event! They demonstrated their leadership, integrity, patience, and caring - the very essence of what fuels FRN’s food recovery movement. We could not have achieved this success without their participation. On behalf of the full team at FRN, we thank our volunteers for their commitment and support of this food recovery effort and the incredible work they do every day to combat food waste and food insecurity in their community. 

Thank you to our volunteers: Amaya Gooch, Emma Anderson, Fran Alvarado (faculty advisor), Haley Anglin, Jovani Herrera, Karson Hawkins, Kearstin Saxto, and Rachel Lord.

Student Debt Cancellation matters to everyone. Here's Why.

On February 28th, the People’s Rally for Student Debt Cancellation will take place in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., the same day the Court will begin hearing oral arguments regarding President Biden’s historic student debt cancellation program. Regardless of if you have student debt, you should support this policy because it has a positive economic impact for all Americans.

According to the Education Data Initiative (EDI), student debt greatly impacts the U.S. economy because consumer spending is directly linked to personal finance. EDI states, “Each time a consumer’s student debt-to-income ratio increases by 1%, their consumption declines by as much as 3.7%.” This debt then translates to less participation in the levers which drive the economy. A 2021 National Association of REALTORS study found that often buyers must choose between “investing in their retirement, purchasing a home, getting married, starting a family or general savings.” The same study found that those suffering from housing insecurity often also face food insecurity. 

As the cost to attend college becomes more expensive, growing at an annual rate of 7.78%, and the ability to buy a home has been compromised due to the increasing debt of students, the number of students and individuals suffering from food insecurity is a staggering 34 million people, 34% of which are college students.This number can be as high as 71% of “nontraditional” students, meaning students who may be enrolled part time, work full time while in school, be caretakers of dependents, etc.

Historically, going to college has meant better prospects for long-term earning potential, including marginalized groups and as a whole. Mostly, this is still true, with four-year degree holders earning on average $1M more over the course of their career than those with a high school diploma only. However, the student loan burden and earning potential is not distributed equally. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that over 90% of African-American and 72% of Latinx students leave college with student loan debt, compared to 66% of their white counterparts, and 51% of Asian-American students. This debt, combined with the racial wage gap, continues to put students of color at a disadvantage when building a life following graduation.

That is why to help close the racial wealth cap and support the economic security for millions of people, we support the Biden Administration proposal of forgiveness of student loans. We are encouraging all of our 4,000 students, alumni, business leaders and community partners to join Food Recovery Network (FRN) at the rally on February 28th. Regardless of if you have student debt, you are impacted by those who do. 22% of those with student debt put off starting a small business, or buying a home, or having a family - all actions which drive economic growth. Put differently, if the 26 million borrowers who qualify for relief actually receive it, you will benefit from that relief as well because more money will be put into the economy at a time when it is much needed. 

Forgiving student debt is a substantial contribution our government can make today to improve the lives of the 42M people with student debt. This action would disproportionately benefit students of color, who carry more debt, but also benefit the middle class because it would begin the “long process of restoring access, solidity and racial equity to the middle class”, the exact promise a college education was originally meant to deliver. Owning a home, saving for retirement, starting a family, would all be more within reach for those who otherwise are putting off those major economic decisions because of student debt.

Poverty is a policy choice. Forgiving student debt is the economic choice.

Katie Jones is the Chief Operating Officer of FRN.