From the real world
Jennifer England came home from a trip to Los Angeles in early March sick with a cough and fever. She quarantined for two weeks.
She couldn’t go out for food or supplies and had to get groceries delivered. The experience left her feeling helpless and — later — a little lucky, because it offered a revealing perspective before the spread of the coronavirus was even declared a pandemic.
Ms. England is the senior program director at 412 Food Rescue, an East Liberty-based organization that recovers surplus fresh food from places like grocery stores and restaurants in Western Pennsylvania and redirects it to people in need, usually through partnerships with other food and housing nonprofits.
“People who are food insecure that were in the same position, what were they going to do? You can’t necessarily afford to get your groceries delivered. You can’t use SNAP online,” she said, referring to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps. (Some retailers in Pennsylvania began accepting SNAP payments online in June.)
412 Food Rescue recognized very early in the pandemic that the health and employment crisis was going to exacerbate food insecurity, in part because two of its major donors of surplus food — restaurants and grocery stores — were profoundly disrupted right away.
Restaurants were forced to close, putting tens of thousands of regional employees out of work while leaving distributors with nowhere to sell their food. Grocery stores were slammed with demand, and their workers were at high risk of contracting the virus.
“The impact on the food system can’t be overstated,” Ms. England said. “It just rippled from the top all the way to the end consumer.”
The organization’s staff quickly recognized that they would need to reconfigure operations to ensure people who needed food still got it under completely changed circumstances.
Instead of bulk deliveries to public housing, 412 Food Rescue partnered with a church to pack donations into individual bags that could be dropped at senior high-rises and family centers and distributed without needing people to congregate in community rooms indoors.
It also mobilized volunteers to begin home delivery to vulnerable people who did not live in those centralized communities. It coordinated food delivery to bus stops to reach kids that would normally have been getting breakfast and lunch at school. And it started a program called Community Takeout that directed donations to struggling area restaurants that prepared 15,000 meals for vulnerable community members and raised funds for a mutual aid program set up to support out-of-work restaurant employees.
The surge of need — and the effort to satisfy it — was massive. In the previous busiest month in the organization’s five-year history, 412 Food Rescue received and distributed about 300,000 pounds of food, Ms. England said. In June, it handled 1 million pounds.
Although everyone at the organization worried that food donations would run short after the initial glut passed, the supply dip was relatively brief.
A coronavirus relief package passed by Congress included the Farmers to Families program, which pays distributors to purchase food from farmers, pack it into family-sized boxes and work with nonprofits to get it to people who need it. 412 Food Rescue, which was founded in 2015, had the infrastructure in place to get the food to the community.
Part of that infrastructure is technology. Food donations are entered into the nonprofit’s computer platform, which alerts volunteers about nearby pickup and distribution opportunities through an app called Food Rescue Hero. The magazine Fast Company this year named the app a World Changing Idea.
Demand for the technology is also surging, as cities across the U.S. and Canada look for platforms to help them manage the intricate, time-sensitive work of getting surplus fresh food to hungry people instead of landfills.
Ms. England, who is 51 and lives in Morningside, worked as a communications consultant for advocacy nonprofits before she joined 412 Food Rescue when it first started.
She knew Leah Lizarondo, 412 Food Rescue’s CEO, through the board of the community gardening and sustainability nonprofit Grow Pittsburgh.
Over coffee one day, Ms. Lizarondo talked about her idea for what would become 412 Food Rescue.
“I thought it was the best thing I’d ever heard, so I said, ‘Yeah, I want to be involved,’ ” Ms. England said. “I kind of meant, ‘I’ll manage your Facebook page.’ ”
Her job has evolved and now includes working with the operations team, donors and prospective donors and with other cities that have adopted the organization’s technology platform.
Her earlier career gave her insight into how nonprofits work and grow, but Ms. England said the best prep for the job is her love of puzzles and the board games that are a major hobby for her and her husband — “really complicated, crunchy, three-hour board games.”
“It’s looking at all of the various possibilities and winding your way through that maze to find the ideal solution to the problem,” she said. “For me, that is exactly what food rescue is about.”
A possible side benefit of the job: “I’m starting to win now,” she joked.