We recently connected with Hayden Dansky and have shared our conversation below.

Hayden, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Any advice for creating a more inclusive workplace?

Boulder Food Rescue works to create a more just and less wasteful food system through the sustainable redistribution of otherwise wasted food to communities in need. We create No Cost Grocery Programs, which are designed to address these barriers by taking food to people in places they are already gathered, such as affordable housing sites. They are community led distribution points that engage the voices, experiences, and leadership of program participants. Community leaders run their own unique food access programs and determine when, where and how the food is redistributed. Community autonomy provides a more affirming, accessible, and effective program for users. In operating these programs, trust and relationship-building are essential – we are redistributing produce and power.

Although BFR is community-led and community-run in our programs, we had some work to do around making sure the entire organization was community-led and run, not just the programmatic level. It’s great to give participants decision making power about their food access programs, but for decisions that affect them, like BFR’s budget, strategic plan, overall logistics schedule, and bigger picture, they had less access to meaningful decision making power. We needed to take a look at the organization as a whole and see what barriers existed to keep participants from being involved in the staff and board level.

Prioritizing staff pay and well being and encouraging participants to apply for staff jobs increased the number of participants on our staff (5 out of 9 staff are former participants). For the board, we looked at systems that prevented participants from engaging and addressed each one: from timing of the meeting, childcare, language barriers, stipends for people’s time, to the activities, roles, programming, decision making and internal power dynamics that all need to be addressed.

From our inception, we have had folks with lived experience of hunger and food insecurity running BFR. But we still continue to have a lot of work to deepen our reach, cultural diversity and inclusivity beyond the tally mark of saying we had that experience. This process will always be ongoing, and is important to name as a process.
Our culture is exceptionally different than most organizations. We show up with care, and love, and respect and courage. We have a huge impact around food justice, but we also care about each other in a way that is hard to even show the world. We don’t do things just because we are supposed to, because that’s what other nonprofits do.

We don’t operate in a traditional hierarchy. We are creating a model that we are calling “democratized leadership” and “ethical hierarchy,” a term I learned from Adam Brock’s Change Here Now. What this looks like is shared decision making processes, responding to feedback as a gift, having autonomy over our positions and working collectively to name and own how power shows up in our organization. It’s not to pretend it doesn’t exist, but to have a restorative culture, and talk openly about it. We explore white supremacy culture and how it shows up in us as individuals and within our organization. We have conflict, and we try our best to talk about it. We try to understand one another. We ask for transparency. I personally mess up a lot, and then my team holds me accountable. I mess up and then I apologize. I try to be transparent, and then I forget. I ask for help. I cry sometimes. I laugh a lot. When tragedies happen, we try to support the people most affected by them. We know they affect all of us differently but we allow space to acknowledge how they affect us. We hold grief circles and make sure space is created if someone needs it, instead of going to work pretending like we don’t live in actively harmful systems that affect our mental health and overall wellbeing everyday.

These are our attempts to create an inclusive culture beyond diversity. It’s less about box checking, and more about creating a culture of care. It can be hard to know what to do in this world, but it really matters how we treat each other, so we put our focus there.

Hayden, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got into this work because I cared about food systems, food waste, the climate crisis, people, animals, and my community. I didn’t know what I was doing, as is true with many people, but I just started talking about the issues I was seeing. Other people saw those issues, and together, we decided to do something about it. It is all an experiment, but we wanted to see what we could do together. This is the heart of community organizing – people coming together around common issues and collectively and cooperatively making change.

I got into food because food was the thing that connected me to others. Growing up, most of my friends were immigrants. I didn’t speak the same language as their parents, but we would spend time together, and food was an exchange of care. Because of this I tried foods I had never had before. I didn’t have the language then that I do now, but I can see that my family and their families were building connections rooted in resource sharing and reciprocity. This is the heart of BFR – a relationship with others built around food, and rooted in reciprocity, trust, and care. I want to live in a world where people have the resources they need to thrive, so they can build the connections that they need with others, to feel some sense of belonging.

According to Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger, 2 in 5 Coloradans are struggling with food insecurity since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the same report, more than half of households with children in Colorado struggle to reliably access nutritious food and 1 in 5 children aren’t getting adequate nutrition specifically because their families don’t have enough money to purchase healthy food.

Boulder Food Rescue facilitates bicycle-based distribution of surplus food from grocery stores to communities across Boulder through No Cost Grocery Programs (NCGPs), which are community-led food distribution points. Broadly, this service benefits people with low incomes, including people who have experienced homelessness, families living with disabilities, Latinx families, immigrant families, people living in the rural mountain regions adjacent to Boulder, and older adults.

NCGPs exist to mitigate barriers associated with food banking or government food benefit programs and build alternative infrastructures to meet food needs. For example, NCGPs mitigate barriers associated with red tape and paperwork by requiring no documentation. They mitigate barriers with transportation by operating in places people are already going to be like residential spaces, schools, and daycares. They mitigate barriers associated with shame and stigma by being operated and led by community members. We encourage communities to operate their program according to what works best for them and support them as requested in that process. Community members volunteer to receive and display food, inform neighbors about the program, and maintain the community space that the food is distributed in while BFR delivers food in quantities, qualities, and types that are desirable for individual communities at times and locations that are convenient to them. If there is a problem with the distribution of the food, we help mitigate that by making adjustments to the delivery or facilitating conversations within the community to help the delivery operate more optimally and equitably.

So we are unique for a number of reasons:

– We are bicycle based, with a 150 active volunteers distributing food 12 times a day, every day of the week.

– We are decentralized, meaning we don’t take food to a centralized warehouse where it gets sorted and distributed like in a traditional food banking model. This allows us to focus on healthier food and get it to people right away.

– We are community-led and participatory. Nonprofits often do not let program users have power or a say in how programs operate. We are flipping charity on it’s head and giving power to people instead.

– We are working to change the “nonprofit industrial complex.” Traditional charities are rooted in white supremacy and martyrdom, working to advance only their own agendas of the people in power and looking good along the way. They don’t solve the problems we are trying to address. By giving power to people, we are changing that. This work takes time and care. It’s built in relationships and often those relationships go unnoticed. The work goes unnoticed.

While some organizations have a very broad impact, our impact is deep, but underground. We operate in communities and backyards of program users, which isn’t visible to the public. Relationships is not a common impact measurement. Most people want to see numbers of people served or pounds of food distributed. This is important but also shows that more people are hungry! Instead, we are building meaningful connections as the backbone of our larger systems change strategy.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

Boulder Food Rescue (BFR) was developed in 2011 by five volunteers: Caleb Phillips, Becky Higbee, Nora Lecesse, Helen Katich, and Hayden Dansky. We all had other jobs and school programs. We all worked as volunteers outside of our jobs. The others were finishing undergrad or their PhD’s while I worked as a landscaper. We came together at night to discuss the experiment that became BFR. We did our programming on the weekends.

In University of Colorado research conducted by two of BFR’s five founding members, they discovered that enough food is thrown away or otherwise wasted each day to feed everyone who goes hungry in Boulder and Broomfield Counties. Thus, we reached out to local grocers and learned that much of their produce could not be donated to food banks because the food was too perishable or because of policy restrictions, which amounted to thousands of pounds of nutritious food being thrown away every day. We started by providing a meal in the park under the name Food Not Bombs. When it was discovered that the meal was the healthiest in Boulder, the organization quickly grew from 5 friends to hundreds of volunteers, picking up food 15 times a day, every day of the week, by bicycle.

In order to turn it into the organization it is today, with 9 staff and a national presence, we had to fundraise. None of us knew much about fundraising, but we just started asking everyone we knew to give. We created an Indiegogo campaign and sent it around to friends, professors and family members and we asked them to share it as well. We weren’t all connected to a lot of money, but we did have social capital, and a lot of people gave a little bit. We raised enough money to bring me on as a part time employee. Later, we decided to increase that to full time. Although significantly underpaid for a long time, our original staff dedicated a lot of time to continuing to fundraise and figure out our niche as an organization. When we were funded by the City of Boulder Health Equity Fund, in 2017, BFR was raised to a new level of sustainability and success, bringing us to be the 9-person organization we are today.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

I’m writing this in March of 2022, two years after the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US. We have been through two years of isolation, supporting our communities in immense grief and loss, burnout, political and racial reckoning, and intense worldwide traumas. Our community is currently experiencing a deep fatigue. Some might think that now is the time to maintain high morale, but I’d like to consider an alternative to the concept: Being real with one another.

As a manager, I think it’s important to remember that you’re human, your staff are humans, and most people are actually craving authenticity over a need to stay in high spirits. So many of us close off what we are actually feeling to be able to show up to work. This is important at times, and serves a role in our coping, in our society, and in our need to survive. It can also come with drawbacks, namely, pretending to be in high morale when we are actually not. I think what many people are craving is the ability to show up as themselves, wherever they are. This includes showing up in their identities, feelings, needs, and boundaries. This does not mean that everyone has to share everything going on in their lives, and I don’t think they should. It’s important to have a right to privacy. However, I also think it’s important to not pretend that everything is okay when it’s not. If someone is struggling, I want to know that, and understand how to support them and how they like to be supported in their unique struggle. If someone is feeling great, I want to know that, and celebrate what’s good for them, in the way they like to be celebrated. Both of these could look like nothing, but understanding that is important as well.

This takes time to get to know your team, and also takes vulnerability to share pieces of yourself. The intention here is not to make my team do additional emotional labor for me while I process some hard things, but to share honestly about where I’m at so they know how much capacity I have as well. Owning mistakes, being honest, sharing parts of my life that feel appropriate to share, and making myself human, gives permission for others to be human as well. Allowing people with different needs, perspectives, and desires to come forth is what feels most important to me in being real with one another.

Contact Info:

• Website: boulderfoodrescue.org
• Instagram: @boulder_food_rescue
• Facebook: Facebook.com/boulderfoodrescue
• Linkedin: Boulder Food Rescue
• Twitter: @bldrfoodrescue
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BoulderFoodRescue

Image Credits
All photos taken by Lou Creech, Boulder Food Rescue, Communications Director