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.