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Nonprofit Leadership Podcast
How a Small Group of College Students Launched a National Movement
00:41:48
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This is Dr.
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Rob Harder with the nonprofit leadership podcast, Making youg World Better. What does it take to be an effective nonprofit leader today? What are the biggest challenges? What are the biggest obstacles? How should nonprofits fundraise in an economy that is constantly changing? All of these reasons combined led me to start this show. And it's my hope that through this series, people can learn not only what it takes to be an effective nonprofit organization, but to hear from effective leaders who, who are successfully making a positive impact in their communities. We hope you enjoy the show as together we hear how they are making their world better. Welcome back to the show. I'm Rob Harder, the host of the nonprofit leadership podcast. Today, we're going to talk about food. It's not a foodie show. This is not about coming up with a really fun recipe. No, this is all about food insecurity and food waste. And my guest today is really an inspiring person, and the story of his organization is unbelievable, actually. And you're going to get a chance to hear it. And let me just set the stage for you because I think I've had a lot of people, first of all, on the show that are involved in the area of food insecurity and, or food waste. And it's a big deal, right? In every community around the US Every state, and then throughout the world. Of course, food waste and food insecurity are big issues and they're not getting any easier. But this particular organization is really bringing those two together and really finding the link between, for example, farmers who have food that is going to go to waste and going to the landfill and food pantries that need food, fresh food, healthy food. And so they're really serving as that link between those two things. And it's unbelievable to hear the story. So I'll just, I won't take the thunder away from my guest as he tells a bit of the story, but just to give a context, they started as college students. It was during 2020, so it was during the COVID pandemic, right? And they decided to do something about food and they want to help their local food pantries. And so they start this kind of a little bit on a whim, just wanting to do something rather than playing Xbox. They decided, let's do something productive with our lives. And then it's grown into a national nonprofit organization. And get this. So actually, it's grown. And he'll tell you in the story. But right now, they've already, in just the five years being around, they have delivered over £350 million of food. That is unbelievable. That is a lot of food. And they work throughout the United States and now they're starting to work and do some international work. So anyway, it's just a fascinating story of passion that turned to a really good plan that turned into a sustainable project. And that's what the Farm Link Project is all about. And I've got Aidan Riley, he's the co founder of the Farm Link Project. I'll put some information in the show. Notes, notes. So you can go there and check all the links out. And they've got a documentary that was filmed at Sundance and some other places. So some really interesting information. And again, the way they went about it and how they continue to sustain their work is super impressive. And I think for all of us, regardless of the nonprofit organization you're a part of, and regardless of how much you want to scale or need to scale your organization, you will learn a lot from the approach Aiden has and what they're doing to really make a huge issue, something that they're finding great success with. So it is a fascinating story. Always good to have you here. Thanks for tuning in. Now onto the show. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox. DonorBox. Helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Well, welcome back to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. So glad you're here. We've got a really interesting topic today to discuss and we've got Aiden riley from the FarmLink project. So, Aidan, first of all, just thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here on the show.
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Thank you for having me on.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, as I've gotten to know a little bit more about your organization, I think this will be a fascinating conversation, particularly for those of my listeners who are involved with any kind of humanitarian and or food insecurity focused nonprofit because you've got some really interesting things you're doing. And I love a bit of the background story that I'd like to start with of how you got this started. So let's do that. What inspired the creation of the FarmLink project to begin with and how did a group of students really. That's what I loved, by the way. Your story is about students and I think some people underestimate the power of what students can do. So how did this group of students mobilize a national movement when it comes to tackling hunger and food waste at the same time?
- [04:37]
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I'll take you back to 2020. It was just been. I was a junior in college. I was just been sent home. So you Know, we got sent home probably the beginning of March and my childhood friend and I, we'd grown up together in Los Angeles. We said, let's do something useful. We probably sat around and played Xbox for a and help no one. But we said let's do something useful for our neighborhood. We're able bodied. Let's try to help. So we, first place we went is to our local food bank. We grew up volunteering there. We were like, we can volunteer. They told us we don't need volunteers. We have a lot of people reaching out to volunteer. We need food. They had gone from pretty much 300 families that they were serving a week to almost overnight. They went to a thousand people that were coming. Thousand families coming to their, or depending on, you know, asking for food. And I had just read an article in the New York Times about farmers being forced to dump all the food as contracts got cut last second. So I was seeing photos of eggs getting, particularly eggs getting dumped, like millions of them, millions of gallons of milk getting dumped into the ground. And basically it was the exact things that the food bank was saying they had a shortage of. So we had a, I would call it a naive idea to say, why don't we just call these farmers, ask if we can take the food and get it to our food bay. So we did exactly that. We basically made a big Google sheets list, had a bunch of friends help us call all the farmers that were in and around Los Angeles. We got hung up on a million times. Eventually someone was like, sure, you can have my extra. It was onions or eggs was the first one. And they said, I just don't have a truck and I'm not going to figure out how to get it there. So we said, we'll handle that part. We rented a truck ourselves. I like drove a U haul that we like painted Farmlink the, the name Farmlink on the side of.
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That's awesome.
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Picked up 60,000 eggs, drove it back on the 405 freeway, gave it to our food bank. All it cost was the cost of the U Haul rental. And we were like, oh man, this might actually work. And we brought on more and more students to help us. Basically divided into three teams. We're like, we're going to be the team that calls farms. You're going to be the food bank team that calls food banks. And we're going to have a truck coordinating team that we call Deal team six. And within a month, we moved a million pounds of food.
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Within a month. That's incredible.
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Wow. Maybe less. And then Farmers started to call us and say, we've heard about what you guys are doing. I have got potatoes out on my farm in Idaho. I've got onions in Washington.
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So it went beyond California really quickly.
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Very quickly. It went beyond California once we started, you know, I stopped driving the U Hauls. We started working with professional drivers really quickly and we got some press and we got a lot of press early on about what we were doing because it was like kids who knew nothing about agriculture or charitable food system really, but they were just trying to figure out a way to help and succeeding at it really resonated at that time. I love that.
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That's such a great story. I love again, just willing to go for it, having passion. But then quickly, I know you started putting together a pretty good plan and some structure within that. Okay, so here's a couple of stats for my listeners with over 350 million pounds of food delivered since that start in 2020. So let that sink in for my listeners again, over £350 million. So I know a lot of people are involved in a food pantry themselves or some type of work that works with food insecurity. That's a lot of food. I got a ton of food. So let's talk a little about the systems and the partnerships because that seems to me is your. The secret to your sauce, so to speak, is you've been able to quickly build partnerships and build a good system to keep this and make this sustainable. So talk about that. Which ones have been the most effective? I guess number one. And how did you go ahead and connect with them and keep those relationships strong?
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Yeah, that's a great question. And I will say you had the right stat at 350 million. That's what we have public at the moment. But we move so quickly that it's looking more. We basically have to go back and confirm every statistic. But it's looking like in our next update we're actually going to be about 500 million. So we're going to be around half a billion pounds of food that we may. So anyways, it's. It's working and scaling really quickly. And the reason I would a huge part of that is because first of all, it was set up for scale. It was, it was set up to address hunger. Yes, of course. But starting with the food waste, with the aspect of food waste in the US where we have pretty much over £100 billion, basically a third of every pound of food we grow is getting tossed in the United States and it's huge and you know, that in and of itself wouldn't be. We think of it really as like, what an amazing thing. We live in a country that has such abundance. We're the first society in the history of humanity to have that abundance. The only time it sounds tragic is when you look at the fact that tens of millions of people in the country alone are not getting access to food or fresh, healthy food. But to answer your question, even more so, I would argue that we have the infrastructure in place to distribute, if not all of that food, enough of that food to basically end hunger in the United States. And by infrastructure, I mean we have the supply chains, we have the farms, obviously, and supplying the food. But when you look at the charitable food system, basically the thousands of food banks and community centers across the US that distribute those all exist. There's enough warehouse space, enough cold storage space, and really what it is, is there. Well, our, our service, as we say, we just want to help provide that, like, connective tissue between all these existing organizations. A real, a real life example would be in West Virginia. I'll mentioned West Virginia probably a couple times over this podcast, but we just did a huge thing where we rescued 50 million apples. We're pretty sure it was the biggest food rescue in the history of the United States. And we distributed across 27 states. Most of the food banks in the immediate areas around those apple farms, they had enough apples. They were, they did not want or need any more apples. But a state Uber or at the time when we were doing this, a lot of the south was getting hit by hurricanes. They needed that fresh food. And when we were able to go and link those farms with others, with food banks, communities that they would have never been able to get in touch with, I mean, it did amazing things. We had stories, we had reach out who said they hadn't had a bite of fresh food in a week and a half and they had literally had like ears in their eyes. And so that was us just using what was already available and just providing that freight and logistics to make it possible. So pretty much we have over 1200 food bank partners across the US something like over 400 farm partners in that we work with them relatively regular basis. And the reason we've been able to make those is because we're meeting them where they're at. We're saying, you don't need to stretch or even spend money to work with us. We're just going to do something that's going to benefit the farmer and the food bank and we'll cover the cost of the in between, that's amazing.
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And I know with my own work and then other people that are in the space, there's a lot of, like, each state has a large food bank of some type, like whether it be the Colorado Food bank or the Utah Food bank, the California Food Bank, I'm sure. Do you tap into that? And I know the larger national group is Feeding America. Is that something you work with kind of alongside. Tell me more about that. With existing structures that are in place. I mean, I know you've got a unique, like you say, I like the word connective tissue. You're connecting farms with, you know, food pantries. But are you working with existing organizations or they have their own networks? Tell me about how that works.
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Yeah, our philosophy is we work with all. Basically, in order for food banks to do a great job of serving their communities, they have to be in those communities and they have to focus on those communities. You know, they. And, and the, the plus side of that is that they know what's needed. They're most of the time close to the source of the people they serve. The one downside, just by nature of that is that they're really regionally focused and it's not extremely conducive to collaboration. And so what we're trying to change that, it's like, let's make this available for all. We're going to work from everyone from Feeding America who's incredible, to the thousands of independents who are outside of that Feeding America network where you're talking about farm working communities, people who literally grow our food but then don't have access to it themselves. Indigenous communities, communities, rural communities that we just got back from, some that, you know, they're two hours away from their local grocery store or from their grocery store and they just have no access. That's where we're like, we can really provide a value out here. I mean, we've hung pallets of food from helicopters that we've flown into the Grand Canyon to reach communities. We've taken planes up to the really northern parts of California that are not accessible by roads because of storms. We kind of stop at no end to say we're going to get this food where others can't.
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That's incredible. No, well done. I love that you just like, we're going to work with everybody, first of all, and we're going to do whatever it takes to remove that barrier of access to good, healthy food. Okay, so this is more of a philosophical question, but I'm curious now that you've been in the space for a while. You've been doing it for a good five years now. In your opinion, from all your experience, why does perfectly good produce still go to waste in the US and then what are the biggest barriers you keep bumping into that prevent you from getting that food to people that need it here in the US Anyway?
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Yeah, I've been searched for the last five years of who can we point the finger at? But the reality is there's no finger to point here. I mean, the, the base level that I would say is that I could put the blame on myself and people like myself, where it's like, if I went to the grocery store and I was perfectly fine taking like an avocado that was perfectly good, but it had a little bit of a bruise on it. But I switch that out at the grocery store. Even with the work I do, sometimes if there's another one that's right next to it, the consumer preferences really, really shape the markets. Therefore, what retailers order, therefore what farmers grow. And a lot of the food that we see going to waste, a good chunk of what we move is stuff that's already picked. You know, it's harvested, it's packed, it's washed, it's put in bins, it's on its way to go to your local grocery store. And there might be a quality issue that has nothing to do with how edible or even how fresh it is. It could be just a. And then the whole truckload of like £40,000 of whatever that was gets rejected. And they don't. At that point on the truck, you know, you can't really figure out where it's going to go. You got 24 hours or less to. They're not going to send it back to the farm. So they basically end up sending it to the landfill. And that's where we come in and we say, no, give it to us. But. So. But we're not really in the business of trying to change consumer preferences towards getting the bruised avocado over the right one. And because the reality is why. It comes down to why this food goes to waste, it comes down to, like, weather and markets, like, two of the most unpredictable things you could imagine. If there's particularly good weather one year, farmers who are already growing more than they expect to sell just to have a safety margin in case there's bad weather, they might grow 50% more. And then they're left with all this stuff that's flooding the market. And then otherwise it comes down to just cancellations and Things like that. And the reality is, is there's just been no, let's say, let's call it last option. For these food, these growers and these producers, when something unpredictable happens, which is a hundred percent likely to happen, when you're talking about weather and markets, the landfill has been the best bet. So our idea is like, how do we make it easier to donate than to dump?
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I like that you're. I like how you're solution focused. You're like, okay, let's not point fingers per se, unless it's at us, each one of us as consumers. But like, let's just go to the solution. And you really are providing that solution, you know, for people that don't really have an option. Okay, so one of the things I've ran across when I read your website and kind of learned more about your story, I thought one of the things you do really well and you're even doing here on the podcast is you talk about the demonstrated impact of what you're doing. And I believe that investors, when they give to a social impact organization, they want to have measurable impact from the money and the investment, in a sense, they give to an organization. So talk about that a little bit with my listeners who lead nonprofit organizations or in the social impact sector. How does FarmLink project measure its impact on both hunger relief and climate outcomes? And then like, here's one stat that you mentioned on your website. The prevention of 300,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. Like, that's, that's pretty powerful thing to put on your website. But I know what you're getting at, so talk a little bit more about that. How do you measure it? And then how do you communicate that back to your donors who then get excited, say, wow, my investment. Look what my investment's doing. And I think that's such a powerful way actually to demonstrate your impact.
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Definitely. I think anyone who's listening who runs or works at a nonprofit themselves could probably, especially if you work in development, could relate to the fact that more and more it seems like those who are trying to give philanthropic dollars are approaching it. Almost like it's a VC model. Less than a. We want to see how the dollars, we are going to unlock the next step or some kind of transformative change for you all. And part of that's really exciting for me because that's how I like to think. The other part of me is like, well, we're a nonprofit. We're here to make sure that food is getting the people who need it. Allow us to do that as well. So I juggle both of those when it comes to hunger, which I'll talk about first. There's an immediate need that we are fighting every single day. And it. And if we're spending six to seven years working on an, spending money on an innovative project at in that interim there's people who, I mean there are kids who are not getting school lunches, who are getting malnutritious, getting malnourished. And so anyways, it's a huge aspect of what we do is we're never going to pause our day to day operations of sending millions of pounds of food into these communities in, in pursuit of innovation. That being said, there's, there's a really common term thrown around, you know, the band Aid solution, which is you're treating the symptoms, you're not treating the cause. And when I look at hunger from that perspective and I'm really not interested in, although I'm proud of, you know, the fact maybe we moved a half a billion pounds of food that doesn't show systemic change. We can move £5 billion, but I would rather have half that number if it meant that it was getting consistently to communities in a way that they could predict, in a way they had some optionality and how, and how that is going to then affect how people think of food access in the US and about the fact that 50% of people who could go to use food access in or who could go to their local food bank, they don't go because of the stigma associated. So simultaneously what we're doing is we're starting something simple that we can fix ourselves or lead a movement towards fixing which is there's no vis. There's very little visibility in a lot of the food banks and distribution centers in the US moment. It runs really person to person. If you have a food bank and I have food, I've got to call you and catch you on the right time and day and make sure that you've got enough space in your warehouse. There's a way that we can elevate the charitable food system supply chain and I'll really be independence here to get it closer to the way that a modern supply chain is run where you can see visibility into how much can they take, what do they need on a very live basis. And what that'll do is it'll not only increase the amount of food we can get to people, but it can increase and the consistency, but it'll ultimately end up increasing kind of the, the humanity behind food and the way that People access to food. So that's what we're investing. We're starting with mapping. We're starting with mapping the. We're calling it capacity mapping, where you can literally see across, let's say in Southern California what every single independent food bank could take. We're also going to take that back to using some of the tech that's available to us to see how we can start predicting when this food surplus is going to happen. And the reason that's important is because at the moment, we just get a call from somebody in West Virginia, they say they got 50 million apples. It again comes back to the end recipient. That means we're pushing out these apples to anyone who says they might need them, not people who. There's no optionality there. The more lead time we have, the more we can tailor how this stuff is delivered to the way the communities need it. So, yeah, that's when I'm trying to get my team to make sure we're not just focusing on climbing that number of higher and higher pounds of food moved, but actually where are we doing consistently and changing things. I'll say with, with climate, we, you know, climate's like a hot. No news there. Climate's like a hot button issue. Right. And I use the word climate and you can lose interest. We've gotten angry emails from donors who don't they. I signed up to talk about hunger. I didn't want to hear about climate. Even though food waste is a really significant driver of methane emissions. More than the entire airline industry. Yeah. If a stat is like if. If food waste were a country, it would be the second largest emitter, just behind China.
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B
That's incredible. I never would have thought of that. You know how food can be. Yeah. That's fascinating.
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Wow. Okay. Goes to the landfill, it rots, it releases is methane. And so it's like every time we prevent a truck from going, not only are we helping a farmer save costs on landfills, not only are we helping people who need it, but it's just avoid, easily avoiding methane. And what we wanted to do before we started talking about climate is we spent like two and a half years creating our own methodology that was particularly suited for what we do, which is unique in that there's not many people who do what we do to measure how much methane. Exactly. Depending on the type of landfill, depending on where it came from, the type of food, so that we were making no broad assumptions about the climate impact we were having. So that when we spoke about it, we knew what we were talking about because I think that has been the most damaging thing to the let's say the climate movement is just wrong assumptions that then causes people to write it off in general. So we very rarely spoke about it until we had a verified by a third party methodology where it's like we're our own in house science based protocol here that we've got. So that's how I summarize your question. I mean with hunger it comes to understanding that stats is. It's not the end all, be all. It's about what are you changing on a consistent basis for the future. With climate, it really is about messaging, measurement and accuracy.
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That's fascinating. Okay, this is a little side note, but I just got back a couple of weeks ago. I was speaking at a conference that talked about AI nonprofit. So AI in general, but specifically when I was there to discuss was AI nonprofits, how you can apply AI to do things like predictive analytics and improve redundant activities and just scale certain projects you're trying to do through your nonprofit. It sounds like you're. Are you using AI number one. And if not, that's something I could see would really probably increase the scalability of what you're doing. So tell me more about that like on the back side of what you do.
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Yeah, at the moment to move about 150 million pounds of food a year, we have a small team, less than 10 people who do that. Fewer than people. But you know, within the next couple years we're going to, we're pushing to be moving a billion pounds of food or we can actually start be putting a year so we can actually put a dent in some of these numbers. And so the question then becomes, all right, what are you going to do? Are you going to hire basically a call center full of people or you don't have to do that anymore. That's not that, that's not. You can remain a small lean team that, that doesn't rely on significant amounts of basically that kind of labor. And, and we learned for example that you know, farmers and food banks, they don't want a platform put in their hands. They don't want a new service. They want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to that person they know on the other end. So it's like how do we maintain that while keeping, while making seamless as it can be on the back end. I don't have high hopes for the front end for this industry yet, but the back end, we don't need a team of 500, we need a team of 30, 35 people and we can be moving a billion pounds of food away from the landfill a year.
- [24:45]
B
Got it. I can see that that'd be an interesting fit for. Yeah, utilizing AI in the right way. It's interesting you talked about that personal touch that farmers and food banks want to talk to an actual human person. I think that is something we've had lots of conversations on the show about. I don't think that's going to go away in general. And so I think that's good that I think there's this human to human aspect we'll never lose. But on the efficiency side and the scalability side, I think that's definitely something that particularly what you're doing AI incredibly helpful. So, okay, you mentioned one of the things on your website. You said that your organization's long term goal is to make your own work unnecessary. And it's like you're working yourself out of a job, you know, and I think there's a lot of people that say that, but you know, do they really, are they working towards that? Is there an actual item, you know, next step listed to get there? What would a food system designed to eliminate waste and hunger entirely look like from your perspective?
- [25:36]
A
So, yeah, that statement was really put, help us put ourselves out of business. We came up with that with our marketing team. And the fact was it wasn't from marketing. That was just a guiding philosophy of the organization. If Farmlink is, if Farmlink is providing a billion pounds of food a year, 15, 20 years from now, that means that there's still massive overproduction and there's still really more importantly significant need. I don't think you can answer this question without recognizing that policy ultimately is going to play, is going to play a huge role in that. And I think FarmLink and organizations similar to FarmLink are going to provide the lever to show what's possible. And I really believe that policy kind of follows action. As much as we want to campaign and as much as we will have to campaign and network and mobilize, ultimately what we're the best at is just going out and doing it and then showing our constituents, our elected officials that this is what's possible. Look what we've done. Look how it's helped the farmer, look how it's helped the community. Can we put in incentive that will allow farmers to continue to donate food? Can we put an incentive that's going to make the process of receiving it easier? So I give you like a hard and fast example. I'll go back to West Virginia, these farmers with the 50 million apples, you know, ultimately, if you're talking about farmers, the tax write off that we provide them and the dollars that they avoid losing from having to pay for landfill fees and stuff, that's great and all, but that's not enough for them. They need, they're dealing with such slim margins. They've already invested so much, so many dollars into the growing of that product. They need to recoup some of that cost. And so what we did is we went and we worked. We partnered with the state Department of Ag in West Virginia and we figured out an agreed upon market rate that they could basically purchase these apples from the farmers, which in a few cases for those farmers, we were told it pretty much kept their multi family generational farm open. They were basically about to close because this sudden contract that was cut that put them in a situation was so unexpected, it was actually going to close their farm. It then also that that flexibility allowed FarmLink Organ as an organization to move the food across 27 different states to basically everyone who needed it, not just the people who would take it. So once that example, which I would call very successful pilot happened, we can go back to those state officials and say this is something we could do year in and year out using dollars which are already appropriated for preventing food loss, but might have been appropriated over here. Look how this is helping the farmer and look how seamless this process is. Then it becomes this public, private, nonprofit partnership that I think, that I think can stand the test of time and does not fall into risk of dependency issue where if farmlink goes away, suddenly the system fails. And that's what I'm trying to prevent against. And I don't think you can have that unless you get the government to step in and create policy that incentivizes and creates structure around these solutions. And I don't think they'll do that unless they see how it's working first. And so that's our job.
- [28:47]
B
We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than DonorBox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations and simplifies giving for your supporters. With DonorBox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. Well, that's A great example. And I was thinking, a question I wanted to ask was. And you're already getting to one example, maybe you could talk even more broadly when it comes to individuals, corporations, policymakers, how can we all work together to really contribute to this? Building an infrastructure, for lack of a better term, that don't need for zero. There is a realistic plan to become zero waste in the U.S. like, what are some other things we need to do? I think that was a great example in West Virginia. Are there other things that we can do? Because I'm thinking people that listen to this podcast, they may be individuals or they may be connected to a corporation. They may be part of a large nonprofit organization. They want to be a part of this. What are some things they can do practically to really make zero waste a real possibility?
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People hate waste. It's something I love about what we do, is that it's not exactly very contentious. I. I've never met anyone who has a super strong opinion about food waste. People experience it personally, and then to hear that it's happening at such a large scale, which most people understandably are not aware of, it makes sense. And so or it infuriates people. And I would say, in my experience, your personal practices at home, what you're doing in order to mitigate waste, that's important. Is it going to. Is it going to change the system overnight? Not necessarily, if you're recycling or composting your food scraps. But I will say, in my experience, corporations follow what people care about. And then when corporations follow and understand that this is what their stakeholders care about and they change their strategies, then you start making really big strides. And when corporations are trying to make it easier to get something done, policy tends to follow. So there's a very cyclical process there just with how our society works that I've experienced firsthand from just driving a U haul with a bunch of my college friends to see how that's starting to influence state and federal policy in some cases.
- [31:21]
B
Yeah, I love that. Well, I think that's. I like that you're right. I think it. There's no doubt corporations respond to what people are really excited about, what they're animated about, what they get fired up about. So I think that's a good point. And then I liked how you gave the example, the policy change, because I think there are, for a lot of nonprofit organizations, they have a cause they're really excited about. But there often comes, particularly when you scale it, like you're doing with your FarmLink project, you get to the point you have to get government involved because some of these issues are just too big. In order to be sustainable, you've got to get all the pieces of the puzzle to come together, which includes government policy often. And you're doing that well. Okay. When you think about the logistical and operational challenges you face from scaling from a grassroots initiative, really now, to a national nonprofit, what were some of the most significant ones? And were there any times where you're like, I don't even know if we can keep going. Was there some pivotal moments as you look back, that you're so glad you pushed through, because now here you are just continuing to move forward. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about what you faced over the last five years.
- [32:23]
A
Definitely. Just while it's top of mind, I'll start. Start with the most recent, because it's most relevant to. We just spoke about, is the fact that many of the communities that we work with, I would say most, if not all, were relying on some. Some form of government funding. And so their need was somewhat consistent, somewhat predictable in terms of what it is that we could provide and what it is that they were asking for. And seemingly overnight, in 2025, that became. That doubled it, tripled it. You know, our partners had to lay off, you know, half of their staff. They had. They're struggling to make rent. It's no joke in terms of how serious some of these federal tax cuts impacted these community partners, which, again, just sort of influences my opinion and my philosophy that ultimately the recipient end of how food is getting distributed, I think that's better managed, as with the. Basically from. In the public or in the private sector. Like, I think that there's great solutions that can be created that can stand on their own two legs to make sure that healthy food is getting the people in need. If there's government assistance to be had, then that's always important. Anyways, I wanted to. I wanted to shout that out because it's a very real and ongoing stress our community partners are facing. Which comes back to farmlink and what we're expected to do, which we. It's how we. And why we created this. I mean, it's. I'm grateful we started during a time of crisis because that's how we're set up to respond when someone says, we need this, our first question is, okay, when can you take it? But we are getting more calls now from communities saying, I, who are strapped for resources than we did even during the pandemic before that. I mean, we. I can tell you we had plenty of broken truck axles and sending trucks to the wrong turns out if you're getting turns out if you're having 20 year old, you know, sophomores in college booking massive loads, freight loads might have a few issues. But and our student volunteer team we had at this point, it's been over 700 kids who came through, volunteered and literally built FarmLink, almost all of whom were undergrad students, some high schoolers even. And we're donating as many as 40, 50 hours, 60 hours a week where they were just volunteering to make it happen. And one of the biggest challenges was, okay, this business is basically a hundred percent relationship based. Whether you're talking about the farmer that's going to trust to call you, the food bank that knows who you are, that's going to reach out to like the donor, they got to meet some a member of the team and that that's the reason they're giving. So if you have 100% volunteer organization with a bunch of what happens when a student goes abroad or gets an internship or take up another job in order to pay for school, you lose all those relationships. And I can tell you by no means did we have great strategies for foresight and looking ahead to how do we store all that info. And so when I graduated and we decided to in 2021 and my co founder Ben and I decided to, you know, commit ourselves to this project, that was a rough patch. How do we go from where we are with a crazy large group of 150amazing students to like a smaller, leaner team of people who've been doing this for a really long time. And so we have consistency and a history. And that was the shakiest part of FarmLink because simultaneously it was hard to resist ideas for how do we innovate on what we do. And we weren't ready to innovate. So that 21, 2021, 2022 is very shaky. Even though we had so much success in the first year and we had natural challenges of growing and not crashing trucks and making sure the eggs didn't crack in the back. The real learning stuff for me personally was, was the year two and year three when we were trying to turn this into, quote unquote, a real organization, not just a pandemic project that we saw so many of pop up and then go away.
- [36:22]
B
Super impressive. Okay, so if someone's listening and they want to try to learn from how you made it through those times and then now how are you scaling on your success to another level? Are there things you're already planning, putting into place now in terms of infrastructure, a plan, a team strategy? Talk about that. Maybe that's going to help get you now to the next level. You know, you said like a billion dollar, billion pounds of food. That's a huge goal. And. But it sounds like the trajectory of the growth of your organization is going to get you there. So, Tim, maybe you could talk about that. What are some of your plans and how are you going to put that into place?
- [36:55]
A
Yeah, I would say we're right at the beginning of, let's call it chapter three of Farm Link, being starting this during the pandemic, just bootstrapping everything. The second chapter was understanding what we're good at and focusing on that and not being spread thin, not being a mile wide and an inch deep, trying everything that was cool. And we realized what we are good at is moving any amount of food anytime around the country, any place, and that there was no really any other solution that could do that, that could take a call from a farmer with half a million tomatoes and say, we can move that tomorrow. And so that's what we focused on in phase two. And now I would say, really like this fall is when we're starting to invest and change our, I would say, evolve our philosophy to. It's again, it's not just about the amount of pounds. It's about how are we going to leave this charitable food system better than we came into it? How can we help improve it and drive it towards the right direction? And how, how can we make sure that this process of food rescue is not just reactive for farmers and helping them in a pinch, but might actually have some incentive for them and create some kind of lasting, I would call it even a market for stuff that does not get accepted into the secondary market. You know, they have retail, secondary market and then it goes straight to dump. Basically, no can we have a third price point there where you're going to get no loss and you might even get government funds for that food. So we're starting that like today. And our idea is that you could get a million glasses of water out to people who needed it. But that's not changing the world. You got to dig a well. And so our idea is how are we going to do that? Well, starting with the capacity mapping, it's starting with seeing if we increase predictability from when we learn about food. It's starting by talking to the communities that we work with who are telling us that we're a team of three. We serve 300 families a week. If we just had a forklift, we could serve 600. We're like, all right, we're going to go out and try to figure out how we get you a forklift. Understanding that infrastructure is often more needed than just the food alone. Understanding and listening and then using our ability as this very lean but national organization to go out and make it happen for the independents who are focused on their communities as they should be.
- [39:06]
B
Wow. It's been such a powerful story and it's such an inspiring story. I love how it started with just a desire to help locally. And it was a bunch of college students that had some time on their hands and rather than playing Xbox, they're going to get some food to people that need it. And now look at it and how much you've scaled it already. So congratulations. It's a cool story. For those who are listening and want to get involved maybe or want to learn a little bit more about you and or Farm Link, where would you send them? What's the best place for them to connect with you?
- [39:33]
A
Farmlinkproject.org is really easy. I mean, my email is aiden.rileyarlingproject.org I'll put that out there. Anyone want to send me an email? And if you want to learn more about our story and it's in a more interesting way than me telling it, go on YouTube and look up Farmling Project Abundance and you'll see we made a short documentary about those first, I would say 18 months and screened it all over the country and the world at this point. We screened it at Cop 28 and Sundance and in the U.S. capitol Building. So go. It's a 2020 documentary. Go check that out. But yeah, we're launching, we're going to try to move starting next week, 10 million meals to people in in a couple around the US Right before Thanksgiving. And we're campaign, we're making that happen and we're trying to raise about $700,000 to do so. So if you want to be part of that, go to our website, promptingproject.org thank you so much.
- [40:26]
B
That's awesome. Well, Aiden, thanks again. It's impressive what you're doing. Love the story. I encourage my listeners to go check it out. Go. We'll actually put some in the show notes. Maybe we'll make a link to the documentary and a couple other resources you have on your website because it is a fascinating story. And if you're looking to scale your own nonprofit organization, you're trying to figure out how do I work on policy, not just, you know, the immediate things in front of me to scale your organization, your nonprofit that you're trying to deal with. He's got some great insights and the way they've gone about it I think has been pretty impressive. So as always, thanks everybody for listening in and we'll see you next week. Hey, friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google podcasts and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like, like subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the nonprofit leadership podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofitleadershippodcast.org well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.