SPEAKER_00 0:00

B-E-H-C, the Frequency. Happy Friday, Frequency Listeners. Welcome to your weekend. I'm Shay Castle, and you already know, this is The Frequency, a weekly local podcast covering the news, events, and voices shaping the Boulder Valley. Today, we're going to hear from a Boulder nonprofit that's been serving their community for 15 years. But first, here's a word from our sponsor. Calling all science and nature lovers, CU Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, also known as InStar, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. In honor of this milestone, the Institute will host a science-y celebration for all ages at its mountain research station just north of Netherland, off the Peak to Peak Highway. For more than a century, the station has fostered mountain field science and education. On Wednesday, August 19th, get a peek into its inner workings through guided hikes and tours, hands-on activities, dinner with a scientist, and an evening seminar from ecologist Katherine Suding. Sign up now at tinyurl.com slash MRSopen or find more info on the events section of InStar's website. We'll put both links in our show notes. Great place to start is to introduce yourself and why we're talking today.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

So my name is Sean. I'm the development manager for Boulder Food Rescue. And Boulder Food Rescue's been operating for quite a while here in Boulder County, 15 years to be exact. But a big reason why we're wanting to chat today is because Boulder Food Rescue, while being a big organization, kind of exists a little bit behind the scenes. We've had some cool opportunities to get more connected with some other like volunteer networking opportunities and trying to get more awareness out there of the work that we're doing and way ways that people can get involved.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Tell us what Boulder Food Rescue is and what you do.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Yeah, so Boulder Food Rescue is a locally based just-in-time food rescue. And the reason we draw that distinction, just in time, that means our model operates on a really quick basis. So when we rescue food, it is showing up in people's fridges within an hour or two, kind of the same time it would take you to get groceries home from the store into your fridge. And so that's why there's that kind of important distinction there. But the food we're rescuing and who we're bringing it to, we'll talk a little bit more about that. We rescue surplus food that would have been wasted on the retail side of the food system. So that's grocery stores, cafes, some restaurants, and we've been expanding into local farms as well. But we take that surplus food that's going to be thrown away for whatever reason. Oftentimes it's logistics reasons. And we get in there before it gets thrown away, and then we redistribute it to communities living throughout Boulder who live with food insecurity. There's a problem of food waste over here, and then there's also a problem of people needing more food access, usually within a mile of that grocery store where the food's being wasted. And we just create the obvious solution for both of those problems. Boulder Food Rescue also does a lot of work to challenge some of the root causes of food waste and food insecurity within the food system. And we do a lot of this through our network building programs, which is the Food Rescue Alliance, which is a national organization of grassroots food rescues that share resources, co-teach each other ways to overcome a lot of the logistical red tape that exists within the world field of food access. And then also through our other program, which is called Rootable, which is our in-house software that we use as our logistics to organize and coordinate all of our food distribution. And this model happens through decentralized practice where a volunteer goes to a grocery store, picks up the food that was set aside, and then takes it directly to a community where they then pass it off to another volunteer within that community who organizes the actual food distribution. And this model allows us to bypass a lot of the logistics barriers that people face in food access, things like scheduling to get to food pantries or transportation, the shame and stigma of standing in line in food pantries. And there's so many ways that bringing food to the people makes it so much more accessible than asking people to come to the food. And this model allows us to rescue almost 2,000 pounds of food every single day, seven days a week, and we get it out to about 7,000 people a month.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Wow, that is a lot of food. I want to talk a little bit about food insecurity more broadly. Nonprofit leaders and community leaders have appeared to like city councils and county commissioners and things like that to say like the need is exponential, higher, at least in certain areas, higher than it's been before for housing assistance, for food assistance, all these things. So I'd love to know what you are seeing locally at Boulder Food Rescue in terms of demand.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

100%. The demand is growing. Unfortunately, each year that we expand our programming, the need for our programming has been outpacing that. Where we would love to work in a place where eventually we start celebrating that our programming shrinks each year because that means the problem is shrinking. But that's just not the case right now. And the root cause of that, in at least here in Boulder County, is the disparity between cost of living and wages. And just the cost of living has so dramatically outpaced the like wages that we have here. And so that livable wage is just becoming more and more untangible for people. We see that there is more and more of people falling into what's referred to as a cliff zone. So if people aren't familiar with assistance, with the like intricacies of how assistance programs like Snap or WIC work, those are all income-based programs based on how many hours a week you work plus your pay for that and what kind of dependencies you have. Those thresholds are not set often by local pictures, they're set by either the state level for minimum wage, poverty lines, or the national level. And when we have pockets like Boulder County, where we have a really high cost of living, those programs don't reflect what it actually takes to live here. And so a cliff zone is where someone makes too much money to qualify for one of these programs, but they don't make enough money to actually meet the standard of living within the community that they live in. So you'll have a lot of these people who cannot apply for SNAP, cannot apply for WIC, cannot apply for Medicaid, but they don't actually make enough money to be able to comfortably afford groceries and rent and child care and insurance here in Boulder County. And we're noticing that cliff zone growing and widening to include more and more people. That's a big reason why Boulder Food Rescue doesn't require paperwork for accessing food from our programs. We have found that requiring paperwork not only just creates a lot of logistical barriers that aren't necessary, it also creates a lot of stigma around people questioning if they're poor enough to deserve access to food assistance when they objectively need that access. And so we found it so much easier to just trust people when they say having access to this food would help them. We don't force them to prove it. But yes, across the board, food insecurity is on the rise in Boulder County. We're at a point of about one in eight individuals in Boulder County lives in food insecurity. Over 32,000 people in Boulder County live with food insecurity, which is more people than the population of Louisville. And one in 10 of those individuals are kids.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

But I was talking with my partner recently. Actually, like we went once a month, I'm pretty sure, and we had to get like a finger prick for some sort of blood testing. I don't know why that was in Ohio, and that was also like 30 years ago. So but yes, I I remember that very well. You mentioned your volunteers, so I'd love to talk about how many volunteers do you have and how do they engage with your programming?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah. So Boulder Food Rescue is largely volunteer powered. We have a small staff of about 10 people, and that staff is all logistics. The volunteer group that we have is the real labor on the ground, the people using their hands to physically be moving stuff. And we have a volunteer base of last time I checked, it was about 90 active volunteers who are helping us redistribute food. And how that looks is one of these volunteers, they're called our food rescue couriers. They will have a routine regular shift that they show up to. On a little bit more of the crunchy logistics side, our volunteers use what I mentioned was our in-house software program called Rootable. Boulder Food Rescue built it and designed it from the ground up, which gives us complete flexibility on designing it how we want it to be. It also gives us complete ownership over the data we have, which right now is paramount to keeping our food assistance programming safe and accessible for people because we have complete ownership of all data related to our food distributions, which we've heard throughout our communities helps create an increased level of safety. And one other quick thing about Rootable, just to plug that's exciting, it's expanding to a co-op model. And while Boulder Food Rescue did a lot of the building it in the early years, it's now currently owned by four other food assistance organizations throughout the state of Colorado. And a lot of those changes to it that are going to be happening moving forward are being implemented and managed on this co-op model, which makes this adaptability and data security accessible to other small grassroots food rescues, not just Boulder Food Rescue. I love a co-op model.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

I do want to ask, Boulder food rescue, at least in the past, has been known for delivery by bike. Is that still something that is done, or have you grown so large that now it has to include motor vehicles as well?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. If people notice our logo has the bike on it. And we did really get our roots starting with bikes as the main model. And to this day, bikes are still the main model with which we rescue and redistribute that produce. That being said, we don't say no if volunteers want to use their cars. There's a lot of shifts that we've added to our repertoire that volunteers will use cars for because they're traveling long distances or they are really large amounts of food. Like when we pick up a thousand pounds of produce from Costco, we're not expecting anyone to bike from Superior with a thousand pounds of food on a bike trail where like volunteers go in their cars. And so as the organization is expanded, we have brought in a lot more vehicles being used for food redistribution. However, the majority of food redistribution shifts at this time is still done via bicycle, which is really exciting.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

What does Boulder Food Rescue have going on right now? And within that question, is like, how can people help? How could people in the community assist the mission? Is there anything specific goals you're working toward? Or just like, what do you need? What can we do?

SPEAKER_01 15:06

So, right now, if you want to get involved with direct work, we just reopened our volunteer application for our food rescue courier positions. So if you want to get out there and be the one who is picking up food from a grocery store, taking it to a community bike or car like once a week. If you want to be part of our emergency rescue team where you can have a more dynamic schedule, any way you want to get involved with that, that application is open right now. So if you want to go to our website and just click on the get involved tab, volunteering, you'll see all the info there. At this moment, we are looking for volunteers to help with our fundraiser dinner that we have coming up at the end of August. It's a spin on the kind of traditional farm to food dinner. We call it our farm-to-food access dinner, where we are going to have a three-course meal where each meal is prepared by a different immigrant chef to really honor and highlight the diverse immigrant foodways that exist here. And that's being coordinated by a nonprofit based out of Denver called World Kitchen that helps take immigrant and refugee chefs who land in this country and onboard them into the logistics knowledge that they need to be a professional chef or run a restaurant in this country because they already have all the cooking skills, but it's navigating that bureaucracy that's going to be new and unknown. And so we're really excited to partner with that organization. And we need help putting on the event. But also, if you wanted to be a part of that dinner, we still have tickets available for that. We really structure the event to really bring all of our participants into the exact same conversations that all of the leaders in this community are having right now. And so tickets for that are also available on our website. And then if you also wanted to help invest in Boulder Food Rescue and the future of the work we're doing, we are currently trying to launch a fundraiser for our software program, Rootable, because we launched it last year. And after launching it, we realized that the communities that we are putting this program out for are quickly expanding its use beyond what we originally intended it to be used for. And due to its data security, it is quickly being used for more community organizing, specifically around getting resources to vulnerable populations. And so we're quickly adapting and adding new features to that software that we hadn't planned on integrating so quickly and hadn't budgeted for integrating so quickly. And so that's something that we're trying to fundraise for right now as well. So if the idea of assisting us and building this local, like data secure network that allows communities to self-organize and ensure that their neighbors are getting their needs met, if that's something you're interested in, you could also just visit our website, donate. We're not launching any capital campaigns around this. We are just taking that funding out of our general funds because the need is evolving so dynamically. We don't want to lock ourselves in to anything with a capital campaign. But just know if you make a donation right now to our general fund, if you are feeling inspired by that, know a lot of that money is being funneled to that project right now. And then beyond that, just share this podcast with your community, visit our website, share that with your friends, follow us on social media. Our organization really grows through this kind of word of mouth community sharing and spreading.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

Love to see a community taking a tool and making it their own for what they need. One of my favorite questions to ask, which I try to ask all my guests, but I often forget, is and this could be related to Boulder Food Rescue and the work you do there, or it could be related to anything. What is something that's giving you hope or inspiring you right now in your life?

SPEAKER_01 19:46

I feel like I've been seeing a, I don't know if awakening is the right term, or more just, or embracing might be a better term for it. I've been a fairly politically active person for almost all my life. It's a common occurrence that I kill the mood by bringing up the thing going on in our world politically that is frankly messed up, that is just an injustice that I'm like, we need to be talking about this. How is this not something that we're talking about right now, whether it's chatting with friends or reconnecting with family or at work? And something that has been inspiring for me recently is I feel like I am seeing not only more and more people do that, but I'm seeing more and more response to when I do that of people being like, yes, let's latch on, let's talk about this, even though it's going to really bring down the mood. All the organizing that I've been seeing is also deeply inspiring, but that doesn't feel deeply new. Like those people have been doing that work, and I don't want to undermine their work by any means with what I'm saying. But what's been inspiring is not the people who are like stepping up to lead, but the amount of people that I'm seeing who are stepping up to be a willing follower, so to say, to a lot of this organizing and leading. And that has been really cool to see.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

Thank you for sharing that. That gave me hope too. And as a buzzkill myself, I love to love to hear that that might be changing.

SPEAKER_01 21:51

Yeah. Slowly, I would say. In the right circles, definitely. But but no, I feel like I've been seeing that a lot more. Like it's becoming, I feel like, less taboo to talk about the injustices around us.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Well, thank you so much. Is there anything else we should talk about before we hop off?

SPEAKER_01 22:21

If hearing anything that I've been saying today about Boulder Food Rescue has inspired anyone or open your eyes to what is going on in Boulder as far as food injustice and hearing about some of the work that's going on with food justice, I would just really implore you explore that curiosity and know that Boulder Food Rescue is not the only cool organization doing things about this in Boulder community. I would be remiss to not tell people to check out like Yellow Barn Farm and DAR or the Dryland Agricultural Resource Center. They're doing a lot of amazing things to figure out how to grow the produce we need in drought climates and desert like this, and Harvest of All First Nations is doing a lot of really cool work to bring in more indigenous wisdoms that have been not lost, but intentionally cut out of our discussions of food justice and food sovereignty. And they're doing a lot of really cool work to bring that back into the narrative because that's such an important piece of history that is lost intentionally, that needs to be part of the discussion. And they're also moving all of that forward. Those were just two right off the top of my brain, but there's uproot, there's so many cool orgs. And so I would say if this is like sparking anything in you as a listener, definitely check out Boulder Food Rescue, but know that we are not the only, we're not the only kids on the block doing cool things. There's so many cool projects happening across Boulder right now. And feel free to reach out to us if you want to get more connected to any of those organizations as well. You can shoot me an email personally. It's Sean spelled S-E-A-N at Boulderfoodrescue.org. I can help get you connected to any of those cool orgs that are doing the work because no one organization or person is going to create food justice all on their own. It's going to take people focusing on the growing, the distribution, the access points, the paying farmers adequately. And not one person is going to be able to solve all those problems. So if you're helping one of us, you're helping all of us.