The Ripple of the Student Effect: volunteering matters

I was at one of the sessions of FRN’s 2017 national conference, hosted by the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), when I remember thinking, “this is an important moment.” This moment came when students from UDC were speaking with a room full of about 100 of FRN’s student leaders who had come to the US capital for a weekend of learning. The incredible students at UDC had captured the audience’s passion and desire to act as they shared why and how they organized their own student food pantry at UDC to support their fellow students experiencing hunger. It was one of those unanticipated moments that we couldn’t ever have planned for as we organized the conference. 

Have you ever been in a room full of people who were captivated by what they were hearing? It was incredible to witness as the UDC students explained why they decided their school needed a student food pantry. The students of UDC were very similar to the undergraduates of my alma mater, the University of Maine at Augusta: students who held jobs, mostly full-time jobs, who had families they support, and who took on the expense and time demands of higher education to better their lives and the lives of their families. The student leaders at UDC shared stories about their families, their church service, and their majors at UDC, and like so many higher ed students in the US, they shared that they too sometimes struggled to pay for food because other expenses took precedence. The student food pantry was a way to ease the worry and stress and physical torment of not having enough while you strove to achieve big things.

FRN’s 2017 National Food Recovery Dialogue, hosted at University of the District of Columbia

Leading up to the 2017 national conference, FRN knew about the growing interest from students in our network in learning how to establish student food pantries on campus. We had more and more new chapter applications from students across the US that, when asked why they wanted to start a chapter on their college campus, answered “to end student hunger”. According to a 2017 survey of 43,000 undergraduate students conducted by the Hope Center, “36% of university students were food insecure in the 30 days preceding the survey,” and for community college students, 42% were food insecure. By 2021, The Hope Center’s survey of roughly 195,000 students revealed a food insecurity rate of 34% across 2 and 4 year institutions. I highly recommend reading The Hope Center’s report because it speaks to many of the same challenges that FRN has outlined in our FRN10X strategic framework as we work to ensure the economic security of the 42 million people who are currently food insecure. Like The Hope Center and FRN10X, research from our partner the National Association of REALTORS® also highlights the link between food insecurity and the economic security needed to access other basic rights such as housing. 

Four years after that conference, I still reflect on the importance of the moment that I was so fortunate to witness. That moment had ripple effects for FRN’s future that are breaking shore right now. At FRN, we call the efforts of our student leaders to make positive change in their local communities the student effect. That student effect is powered by volunteering: giving your time, your skills, and your desire to help solve immediate problems, and to contribute to the long-term solutions to eradicate those problems. The student leaders at UDC imparted their skills, their approach, and their knowledge to a group of students who saw and experienced the same issues on their own college campuses across the US. The ripple effect of those volunteer UDC students who took the time out of their packed schedules to teach all of us how to start a campus food pantry or to improve budding pantry initiatives is felt to this day when more students can now access the food they deserve on their college campus. This is what I mean when I talk about the power that we all have to make positive change.

I want to dedicate this writing to all of our student volunteers across the US who work each and every day, during the mornings, evenings, on weekends, and throughout a global pandemic to feed their fellow students and community members in need. In particular, to those student volunteers who teach others how to build and improve systems that allow us to increase our impact to feed more people, faster: you are seen and you are appreciated more than you will know.

Revisiting the past to inform MLK Day of Service today

For the last several weeks I have spent time reflecting on the act of volunteering, what it means to me, and what it means for Food Recovery Network. This reflection was part of my writing process as I prepared a post about the subject for our blog as we all celebrate our National Day of Service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday and his vision of a “Beloved Community”. I then moved from reflection to curious research to familiarize myself with the history of the holiday. I wanted to find out not only when MLK’s birthday became a holiday, but how Dr. King articulated his notion of national service, and when and where it showed up in his time as a national activist and freedom fighter. As I did some online research, more and more questions revealed themselves.

To begin to answer these questions, I think it’s helpful to understand the historic struggle fought to make Dr. King’s birthday into a national holiday. I’ve shared only a fraction of what I’ve learned in this post, and if any of you have other resources you’d like to share, please comment!

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities website reminds us that, “Legislation was signed in 1983 creating a federal holiday marking the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This federal holiday was first observed in 1986.”

After reading that last sentence, did you just become as curious as I did about the time gap between the day the holiday was created and when the holiday was first observed? I needed to learn more, and as I continued to look for further resources, I also understood that I was relearning this information now from the perspective of an adult, a social and racial justice activist, and a continuous learner who seeks information from the perspectives of those who didn’t necessarily have their voices represented in the textbooks of my youth.

Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, and four days after his death, Congressman John Conors of Michigan, who served for over 50 years and was the cofounder of the Congressional Black Caucus, proposed a bill to establish a federal holiday for Dr. King’s birthday. Congressman Conors was not alone in his desire to honor Dr. King, joining with Coretta Scott King and many unions that Dr. King walked alongside in their fight for jobs to try to win a national holiday to honor Dr. King throughout the 1970s. A post from the Reading Partners blog notes that in the early 1980s, “Coretta Scott King submitted six million signatures supporting a bill to establish a federal holiday in King’s honor; Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday,’ a song dedicated to King, inspired a rush of public support.”

I have to let everyone know that I was steeped in historical awe and wonder as I learned about the history of MLK Day. I continued to have more questions about how this national holiday that means so much to me was shaped. I wanted to learn more about Congressman John Conors, further my understanding of the Congressional Black Caucus, dig deeper into the life of Coretta Scott King and her adult children, and while I adore the music of Stevie Wonder and have sung that happy birthday song numerous times, I did not know the origin of it and wanted to know more. 

And, importantly for me, I paid close attention to the swirl of emotions I was experiencing as I read more about the struggle to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. “Struggle” is an understated verb to truly comprehend the magnitude of effort needed to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday, and I am thankful there are numerous accounts of the many individuals like Congressman Connors and Mrs. Coretta Scott King who doggedly fought for this distinction.

“However,” notes the Reading Partners post, “the legislation did not guarantee that individual states would observe MLK Day. Some states combine it with a holiday celebrating Confederate general Robert E. Lee, or rescinded observance of the holiday altogether. It was not until 2000 that all states finally acknowledged the holiday…” In fact, Alabama and Mississippi still celebrate Dr. King’s birthday and Lee on the same day. Arkansas had been the third state to do so up until 2019, but still honors Lee in a memorial in October.

I used the term “relearn” when I described the process of researching MLK Day. I remember when I listened to the audio version of the book Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1953-1964, by Taylor Branch, and learned about the moment in which Dr. King was living, how he was understood during his actual life, and how he is memorialized after his death and by whom. My recent research is only the next step of many future ones in relearning what MLK Day truly means, to me and all of us. 

I hope this post can be a reminder that the spark of curiosity can be ignited all around us. In a subsequent post, I will talk more in depth about Food Recovery Network and how we honor Dr. King’s birthday and our National Day of Service.

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Resources:

American Association of State Colleges and Universities page on MLK

National Geographic post, “The Controversial History of Martin Luther King Day”

Reading Partners blog post, “The History of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service.”

Further Learning:

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1953-1964

Don’t believe the hype about hunger and scarcity: we can all thrive, together

People who are living in poverty are no different from anyone else. People living in poverty have dreams for their children, nurture hobbies, care for their friendships, take care of their loved ones, volunteer, and set goals; they just happen to be weighed down heavily by the stressors and hardships that a lack of resources brings. And “they” are not just an abstract group - they are 42 MILLION of our neighbors. We know our fellow community members who are living in poverty. Many of you reading this identify as someone living in poverty. 

To be clear, the reason our neighbors are living in poverty is not because of a moral failing. People living in poverty are poor by design - a design maintained by false narratives that have been created and strengthened over time. These false narratives often lead us to think people are poor because they don’t want to work hard, because they would rather be addicted to drugs and alcohol, or because they make consistently bad choices in life. It’s a lie. The structural design of poverty is so old that many of us do not question its very existence, and we don’t even see it anymore. If any of the moral failings I mentioned to you sound familiar, there is a reason for that. That we can recall more examples of how people make poor decisions to end up poor than we can examples of how our political and societal structures fail millions and millions of people is the success of the design of poverty in action.

The goal of FRN’s Intersectionalities in Practice conversations is to provide a space for us all to learn about and question the structures that keep 42 million people from accessing the food that they deserve, and, importantly, to bring us all into action to address a structure unsuitable for all of humanity. Below is a snapshot of the important conversation that took place during our latest Intersectionalities in Practice: How Communities Thrive, and a list of the actions from our guests that we can all take today.

Please click below to watch the conversation, share this with your friends, and start a conversation with your personal network. You can also be in touch with us at Food Recovery Network if you want to be more involved in our work.

Meet our Speakers

Shailly Barnes, Policy Director with the Poor People’s Campaign, a powerful partner of FRN’s, reminded us that not only do 42 million people not have access to the food they deserve, 140 million people are poor or ONE emergency away from being poor. The work of the Poor People’s Campaign is to organize those millions upon millions of people - whom Shailly calls the visionaries of their communities - to help them gain the resources that they DO need and have asked for. At the same time, Shailly reminded us how we need to dismantle the “policy violence” that is a deep part of the design of poverty.

Niciah Mujahid, Coalition Director at Fair Budget Coalition, discussed the relationship between community disinvestment and the criminalization of poverty. Niciah showed the connections between disinvestment at the policy level and its impact on individuals in our communities in the form of corporal punishment. Through these connections we can better see the shape of the structure that keeps people in poverty despite how hard they work, that punishes them through our penal system for infractions associated with being poor, and that in turn continues to ensure those punished remain in poverty. I recommend reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow to learn more about this, especially how the penal system also punishes the relatives of those around all of the individuals originally punished.

Teanna Willis is a content creator on YouTube who engages in difficult conversations. Trusted spaces do not spring up out of the blue, and Teanna works to ensure people feel seen and connected to one another so that we can engage in such difficult conversations with love and curiosity. Importantly, Teanna underlined the hypocrisy that can befall the social justice sector when it utilizes low-wage work as it fights to dismantle the poverty structure or other structures of harm. This is a topic very critical to FRN as we center equity in our conversations and our work. During the How to Build Better Nonprofits conversation that kicked off this whole series, we discussed the topic of fighting for social justice while not, at the same time, harming those who wish to join that fight as their day job.

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What Next? Action steps for all of us 

• Attend! June 18 2022: Please mark your calendars and plan to join the mass mobilization of poor people and low wage workers in Washington DC to celebrate this work and continue to take action.

• Read! We Cry Justice to learn directly from those who are working tirelessly to obtain the resources they need. This is a new publication from the Poor People's Campaign and is available for purchase.

• Write! Take 30 minutes to journal what you are learning, what you are thinking, or what you wish to see in the world. Writing is a powerful tool to help us organize our thoughts, capture our reflections and learnings, and fuel us to action.

• Learn! Remember that learning is a process. Many of us are learning new concepts, or unlearning old concepts so that we can learn anew. Take your time with learning, be gentle with yourself, and to quote one of my best friends, Dr. Elizabeth Bishop, read important texts in groups.

• Donate! Food Recovery Network is a respectful steward of all the donations we receive to feed more people. If you are in a position to donate financially, please consider donating to support our work.

Two ways YOU can be a hero to our food system

Picture this: In one hour of virtual volunteering you have the opportunity to help ensure roughly 23 thousand pounds of fresh produce is identified and donated to communities in need. One hour of effort can mean the equivalent of 19 thousand meals being recovered because of you - and then you still have 23 hours left in your day. 

Now, I’m asking you to go beyond imagining it, and to spend one hour of your time during the month of December to help Food Recovery Network and The Farmlink Project. In one hour, you can help us by researching farms in specific regions, and then we’ll contact those farms to see if we can establish a recovery program with them. It’s literally that simple. We have found that on average, one hour of research translates into 23,000 pounds (or 19 thousand meals) of produce being recovered! Head to our website to sign up for one of our virtual Farmlink “Power Hour” volunteer events in December. 

Our Power Hours with Farmlink are a great way to volunteer with and connect with your colleagues, especially while so many of us continue to work remotely. I recently had the opportunity to speak with the employees of Groupon during a Lunch and Learn they hosted. During our conversation I spoke with the Groupon staff about how they have the opportunity to help and make a difference with just one hour of their time by joining us for a virtual Power Hour with FRN and The Farmlink Project. Though many of us are working virtually, we can still have a positive impact on our communities! We’re seeing a lot of people sign up this month and in fact, the FRN national team is having our own team building Power Hour on Nov 22! And we want to formally invite you and your company to join us, too!

The Lunch and Learn with Groupon was fantastic too because it allowed me to introduce the work of food recovery to their staff and why food recovery is so important. The Groupon team asked some very thought provoking questions that got me super jazzed to talk with them because I could tell they were curious and engaged. I was able to relay to the staff that in fact, before Groupon staff started working remotely because of COVID-19, Groupon had a wonderful corporate dining recovery program in place through which surplus food from their cafeteria was donated to Mercy Home in Chicago. I want to give a big thank you to Groupon for their leadership in directly supporting their community with food donations, and at the same time helping our environment by diverting perfectly good surplus food from landfills. 

If your company is interested in hosting a learning experience about why food recovery is critical to helping our neighbors in need, helping the environment, and improving our food system, please get in touch with me! We can cover any number of topics important to your company like I did with Groupon. 

To recap, there two ways you can be a hero to our food system:

1. Join FRN for our Power Hours this month. If your company is looking for a team volunteer experience, this is for you! Whether you are virtual, back in the office solely, or a hybrid, a virtual Power Hour ensures everyone on your team can participate no matter what! It’s fun—you’ll see! Just click the link on our homepage to sign up.

2. Host FRN at a lunch and learn, a virtual “happy hour,” or other time of the day that works well for your team. We are all part of our food system, and it’s important to understand our roles in it! I love to share more about the food recovery movement and how we’re all able to directly help our neighbors in our own communities today. Email me at info@foodrecoverynetwork.org to set up a conversation! 

I look forward to being in touch with YOU.

Regina

Help our network move millions

Since August 2020, Food Recovery Network volunteers have helped recover 2.1 million pounds of surplus food from farms across the country in partnership with The Farmlink Project 🙌 That is MAJOR! 

2.1 million pounds of food is enough to feed every student at four U.S. elementary schools three meals per day for a whole year. How amazing is that?! 

This is super impactful work that we are thrilled to continue to offer to students, alumni, partners, and supporters in our network. The best part? You only need to give one hour of your time to make a big difference! 

Want to join a Power Hour? Check out this short clip from FRN’s Program Manager, Erin Price, to learn what a Power Hour is and how spending one hour with The Farmlink Project leads to millions of pounds of food recovered. 

When you’re ready, sign up to volunteer! This is a great way to volunteer virtually and to meet new people who share your passion for food recovery. It’s also a great activity to do with friends and family, so invite them to join you! 

To coordinate a group Power Hour, please email erin.price@foodrecoverynetwork.org. We hope to see you on a Power Hour soon!