Building a Student Chapter—Relationships matter

(left) Angie Gregory, MHC's Sustainability Program Manager and FRN Chapter Advisor, and (right) Charlotte Cai, FRN Co-Founder and Mount Holyoke College Graduate 24'

When we first considered activating Mount Holyoke College’s (MHC) Food Recovery Network (FRN) chapter, my friends and I weren’t sure whether we qualified. At a school where one centralized dining hall keeps careful track of pre-consumer, recoverable kitchen scraps, it turned out that the majority of food waste came from post-consumer scraps—food that students took onto their plates and threw away at the end of a meal. 

This problem statement made us hesitant. After all, if we didn’t have food available for recovery, did we count as a school that could be part of the national Food Recovery Network? Through many conversations with dining staff, school policy decision makers, and other students, each question led to another open question mark. Would we target policy to create choice structures to guide student food decisions? Maybe aim for the education track, where students would be more apt to hear about food equity coming from another student? Weigh-the-waste events to raise awareness? Community events to encourage longevity? Partnerships across campus? There was no straightforward path—our FRN chapter would just have to take it one step at a time, involving as many stakeholders as possible. This was slower, but it also built a foundation of trust and commitment for sustained change on campus.

What followed was the most fruitful semester of my college experience. We built our FRN chapter through relationships, wading together through the gnarls of the campus food experience to identify three main arms: policy, education, and composting. 

• Co-founder Zainab created an educational food waste module for the first-year seminars required for all new students. 

• Our chapter’s other co-leader Maya researched composting opportunities with MHC’s on-campus horse stables and outlined a blueprint for centralized raised-bed gardens. 

• Throughout the semester, MHC FRN hosted three weigh-the-waste events. During these events, we collected data on the flow of lunch rush and students’ reasons for leftover food, which I used to support my policy proposal for an alternative meal plan option.

•  Additionally, my published piece for the school newspaper brought attention to our role as students within a larger food ecosystem, and the central role care plays in decreasing post-consumer food waste. 

• Halfway through the semester, MHC’s FRN chapter partnered with other on-campus climate justice orgs and our school’s environmental center to host Dining Hall Appreciation Week. During the week, we posted informational signage, led a social media campaign on food waste, and tabled outside the dining hall to create thank-you-dining-workers posters. 

The connective thread through our actions was our commitment to campus stakeholders—students, dining staff, academics, and groundskeeping alike. Since the physical act of food recovery was not feasible at our school, we found alternate ways to contribute to our community’s food experience. Even at campuses where food recovery is the most pressing path forward, there are possibilities for other nodes of connection, led first by continuous and diverse stakeholder conversation. Importantly, food recovery itself extends beyond the physical act into possibilities for community care. When we understand food recovery as part of our shared reality, in what other ways can we reimagine our collective food experience?

Learn more about starting a chapter on your campus.

Food Tank's 22 Podcasts on Food, Farming, and Sustainability

At FRN, we are big fans of Food Tank. This global nonprofit powerhouse is dedicated to transforming food production and consumption, focusing on education, advocacy, and collaboration to make a tangible difference. With FRN’s very own Executive Director, Regina Harmon, on its Board of Directors, we aim to contribute to this work and the on-the-ground solutions it champions.

In case you missed it, Food Tank published this fantastic blog post in June, curating a list of 22 podcasts that explore diverse aspects of food and agriculture systems globally. This roundup is ideal for anyone interested in the multifaceted world of food, from production and policy to personal stories and cultural impacts. Don’t miss out – check it out now!

Allegheny College FRN, Student Gleaning

A Celebration of Earth Month: What’s your favorite tree?

At FRN, at the start of almost any meeting we have, we start our time together with a check-in question to ground us all into the space together. In honor of Earth Month, at a recent FRN meeting, our check in question was, “What is your favorite tree?”

As an admirer of my natural surroundings, as an avid hiker, tree planter and tree lover, I’d never reflected on that question before. And, many in this particular FRN meeting hadn’t either and for the next 15 minutes, we all talked about trees: we shared stories about trees, we googled trees we hadn’t heard of, we oohed and ahhed about which tree was our favorite tree; and it was an FRN moment that I will cherish for a long, long time.

It’s hard to say what tree is my favorite tree. I love so many for so many reasons. I love peach trees because they grow in my region, and I love to eat peaches. One summer I drove down skyline drive into the Blue Ridge Parkway without GPS (and though it was basically one road with no turn offs, it felt like such an adventure to me as someone who can get lost in one room) to go to an edible nursery where I picked up two self-pollinating peach trees for my new house in NE DC. I love magnolia trees and crape myrtles because my husband loves them so much. I remember taking a walk with one of my best friends in Pittsburgh, tree identification book in hand, observing the different trees in her neighborhood, using the choose your own adventure style process to determine which trees we were seeing: if the shape of the leaves look like this, then go here—if the leaves cluster like this, then go here, if the leaves come off the tree directly versus from a stem, then go here...

I recalled to the team that my favorite memory of a tree was the two lilac trees in the backyard of my family home in Maine. And at that moment of relaying my lilac memory, I pondered outloud, “well, maybe they’re bushes and not trees? I actually don’t know.” Another illumination for me that occurred when thinking about trees! These particular lilac trees were both maybe eight feet tall, one flowered white and the other purple. Each tree had a small section taken over by what I now think to be the Eastern Tent Caterpillar, and I spent a lot of my childhood time carefully smelling the lilac flowers from other sections of the tree far away from the moths. I spent a lot of time simply looking at these moth nests fascinated by what they were doing. In relaying this memory of the trees, or maybe bushes, I was brought back to my home state, my old house, my backyard and my curiosity about what in the heck all of these hundreds of moths were doing, growing, transforming, reproducing, journeying, dying.

As a bonus, I also noted that Nina Simone, one of my favorite artists, sings a song I love called Lilac Win. I think a very strong cover of that song was done by Jeff Buckley, and that’s a nice lilac connection that makes me happy when I think of lilacs.

We conclude Earth Month, another April full of growth, transformation, reproducing, journeying, dying. And May presents itself with offerings of the same magnificence and hardships. I wanted to ask all of you to take a moment of reflection with us and let us know, what is your favorite tree, and why?

My Data-Driven Wish Come True

Four years ago when I began my position as the inaugural Chief Operating Officer (COO) at FRN, I was delighted. I came to the organization shortly after I completed my Results Count fellowship with The Annie E. Casey Foundation.  My fellowship experience equipped me to use data to bring a cohesive vision across the programmatic, communications, and operational function areas I oversee. To learn how this work started, evolved, and how it influences our daily operations and future planning, please watch our mapping webinar, How FRN’s Data is Driving Impact. 

Through combining and analyzing six different data sets, here is what I learned about FRN’s work and how we can increase our impact:

• Community colleges are the key to our growth. It is more often community colleges, rather than four-year institutions, that are geographically located in the areas with both the most surplus food as well as the most people experiencing hunger. To help expand into community colleges, we have launched a new grant program to bring our food recovery model to neighborhoods across the U.S. Click here to learn more and apply.

• FRN must implement our programs in the areas of the most need. We believe each state presents an opportunity to reduce food waste, feed people, and fight climate change. By mobilizing 200+ college student-led chapters to recover perishable food that would otherwise go to waste from their campuses and communities and donating it to local nonprofits who feed people experiencing hunger, we have created one of the largest college student-led networks fighting food waste and hunger in the U.S. With our ability to quickly replicate in any area where a four-year higher institution is present, we created a list of all 50 states and the specific area we would start a chapter, within each state, in order to feed more people of the most need, faster. 

The areas listed below were prioritized using a variety of factors including, but not limited to: number of higher education institutions in a given area who generate surplus food (NCES, EPA), greatest need as defined by the difference between the median wage (U.S. Census) and living wage (MIT), number of people experiencing food insecurity (Feeding America), SNAP, food insecurity, and poverty rates (U.S. Census), presence of higher education institutions (NCES), and areas where the population is predominantly people of color (U.S. Census).

States listed below are in alphabetical order.

If you are interested in hosting a Lunch and Learn for your organization to see your individual area, please contact programs@foodrecoverynetwork.org.