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.