Updates on my town’s Food Rescue initiatives…. Some bad…. and some good.
Bad News is we are no longer working with Food Rescue US. To be very clear, they are a wonderful organization and if you have an opportunity to work with them, by all means do so!
My groups model and their model just don’t really align is all. Long and short, they were wanting us to get more food rescue routes quicker than we were able to and when we really couldnt meet their metrics, we both agreed that we should go our separate ways.
Quick Lessons learned here:
- Their model works really well when you have a dedicated and paid staff. It wasn’t working well for a community group comprised of volunteers working in their (often minimal) spare time.
- If you do have a dedicated or even paid group, they are AWESOME!!! Great staff. Loads of in house support. Great app.
- If you don’t have a dedicated staff and are a smaller community group, it might not be the best fit.
Both parties knew this going into it and we had decided to give it a shot anyhow. It didn’t work out. Alas.
Ok. So….. next part is the good news.
With that!!! We have now joined the Food Rescue Alliance (FRA)! They are a mutual-aid group of mutual-aid groups spearheaded by the Boulder (Colorado USA) Food Rescue group.
More info here: https://www.boulderfoodrescue.org/food-rescue-alliance/
They are much more aligned with how we work.
Now, instead of taking orders and meeting metrics from a non-profit corporate model, we operate independently and both rely on and contribute to the greater FRA group members.
This is awesome.
We have access to peer support, best practice information, troubleshooting and guidance, as well as their own food rescue app - Rootable.
Rootable is a Free and Open Source (FOSS) application.
Here is the app website: https://rootable.org
Here is the codebase: https://codeberg.org/rootable/
We’re getting set up on it right now. We’ve been warmly welcomed and have already attended some meetings.
I think this will work out great.