Los Angeles (CNN) When a group of college boys channeled their pandemic suffering, they never imagined that the project would lead to a national movement to address hunger and food waste.
But that’s exactly what the Farmlink Project has done since 2020, uniting hundreds of young volunteers to save nearly 77 million pounds of excess food and deliver it to those in need. The organization’s efforts help farmers, the environment, and people who are struggling to provide for their families at the same time.
“In the United States, 40 million Americans are not food safe. They don’t know where the next food will come from,” said Aidan Reilly, who founded Farmlink. “Meanwhile, in the United States we throw away more than 100 billion pounds of food every year.”
Launched at the height of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, Reilly stated that the project should first help families who are struggling with food banks.
“There’s a lot of bad news,” said Reilly, a junior at Brown University and attending distance learning classes from the earth in Los Angeles. “Economic collapse, political protests, social protests. There is very little we can do about it.”
Reilly and his childhood friend James Kanoff read and saw news about food shortages, and they learned that regional farms had to destroy excess produce that could not be sold, especially with restaurants, schools and hotels closed.
“We see incredible photos. Like a mountain of potatoes in someone’s game, or millions of gallons of milk just thrown into the dirt,” Reilly said.
Reilly, Kanoff and a group of core friends, including Will and James Collier in Connecticut, worked together on Zoom, text and e-mail to contact the gardener to the coast.
“We’re not really going to start a nonprofit,” Reilly said. “We just thought, ‘There are a lot of people who are suffering, if we can know a way to help then that would be good.'”
In California, they find a farmer who has 13,000 eggs that can be donated, and Reilly offers to pick up and delivery alone.
“It was the first drive,” Reilly said. “I, on Highway 405, honking, with eggs bouncing in the back, just asking the food bank so we can feed a few thousand people.”
It was the first of many more deliveries. With “we’ll come to you,” as its keyword, the group rents a U-Haul truck and tries to carry out all pickup and delivery alone.
“We got a lot of hiccups at first,” Reilly said. “We broke the axles … loaded in 40,000 pounds of potatoes the wrong way (and) had to try to drag them out using another truck and rope. But we made it work.”
Students eventually received a welcome boost in the form of a grant from Uber Freight, Reilly said, and with the help of professional drivers, they transferred more than a million pounds of proceeds from the farm to a food bank in just two months, changing their passion. projects into massive logistics operations in process. Word spread, and more and more young people on earth as long as the pandemic reached out to help.
“We were just lucky enough to be the first to unite these people,” Reilly said. “The 70 million pounds of food moved – that comes from the efforts of this group. They’re volunteering their time when they can to help feed people they might never meet.
Farmlink has worked with more than 100 farms and 300 communities in the U.S., rescuing and diverting enough food to distribute more than 64 million meals, Reilly said.
“The bigger Farmlink, the bigger our worldview,” he said. “There are American people everyday, people who live next to you and me, who don’t know how they’re going to treat their children. And that’s whoever we’re doing this.
Want to get involved, check out the Farmlink Project website and see how it helps.
To contribute to the Farmlink Project via GoFundMe, click here
