We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sean Kohler. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sean below.

Sean, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

To say that I was risk-averse as a child feels like an understatement. Throughout my adolescence, I was very cautious. I took very few risks, generally not embarking on something (no matter how small) unless I was sure beyond a doubt of its success. While this led to a lot of accomplishments, it also created a lack of trust within myself. While it seems like my experiences with success would have created an abundance of trust within myself, it actually left me with very little resilience. Lack of action had caused me to become uncomfortable with uncertainty and overly dependent on external structure.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to accept and move into a world of risk and uncertainty. I’ve realized that the amalgamation of events brought into reality from uncertainty is far more risky than a world of ordered plans and far more beautiful and impactful.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am the development manager for Boulder Food Rescue, a just-in-time food rescue working to reduce food waste and increase food access in Boulder County. We do this by rescuing produce that would be wasted from grocery stores and taking it to communities that live with food insecurity. My role with BFR is to tell our story, to express gratitude to the hundreds of people who support us with donations, and communicate the impact of the work that we do. This position often has me in the unique place of telling someone else’s story and speaking for things beyond just myself. in order to tell these stories successfully, I must constantly be learning about the communities that are part of our food distribution programing and how they fit within the broader systems of not only boulder county but the entirety of our industrial food system.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

The goal driving my creative work is chaining a feeling that is created by our work. All of us have a deep connection to food, and whether we continuously realize it or not, food is a powerful connecting force for all of us. When BFR rescues food from being thrown away and takes it to someone who has been denied adequate food access, there is something deeply healing and inspiring about that action. It is this feeling of breaking free of the toxic systems of our society that tells us to isolate ourselves from each other and exploit the world and people around us. In this simple act of saving food, there is a feeling of connection and compaction for everything that went into that food (the water, sunlight, nutrients, and work) and everything that can come out of it (strength, nutrition, health, happiness).

When you volunteer for one of our food recovery shifts, it’s easy to feel this feeling, but it is often hard to tap into this if you are not there doing the work for yourself. Attempting to convey this feeling is the goal that motivates all of my communications.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

For BFR, how we do the work is just as important as what we are doing. There is an inherent power dynamic in the charitable food system that we work against. This power dynamic is inevitable, as we have access to a basic resource that someone else needs. There is no way for this dynamic to not be in place, but there is a lot we can do about how we approach it. BFR views food not just as nutrients and calories but as power as well. Food sovereignty is at the heart of all forms of independence and autonomy. it is not enough for us to just distribute food. We need to do this in a way that has the power distributed with it. One of the ways that we do this is by having the community organize its own food distribution. This allows them to by pass barriers and ensure that food is distributed in ways that work for them. Another way we do this is through our democratized leadership structure. Instead of a top-down approach, BFR implements a bottom-up approach where community members inform us of the elements of our programming that work and the ones that don’t. We then use this insight to guide our work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.boulderfoodrescue.org/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boulder_food_rescue/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boulderfoodrescue