We were lucky to catch up with ShugE Mississippi (AKA Christopher Allison) recently and have shared our conversation below.

ShugE, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?

I’ve been in the food rescue world in the Twin Cities for a very long time now & worked & helped build numerous nonprofits dedicated to food rescue related work. In my experience the longetivity of this work depends on making it sustainable for the people doing the work. Some people look at a nonprofit charitable project like Community Driven & see somewhat of a hobby project or something that can be supported in their spare time on occasional weekends. It’s easy to forget that a project like this needs core staff & infrastructure just like any business. This is very hard work at times & we shouldn’t cut certain corners like I’ve seen at other nonprofit food rescue projects in the past.

At Community Driven we’re building a foundation that will last by making sure the support is there for the people doing the work. We remain small in staff size because we don’t hire workers unless we can really afford them at a livable wage & we keep our expectations of volunteers realistic so that we don’t find ourselves retraining volunteers so often that it causes burnout & would have been more sustainable just to pay someone to stick around longer-term at the tasks at hand. Human beings involved are our most valuable assets & we need to support them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Community Driven is a small Minneapolis-based tax-exempt 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit that rescues food from local businesses (restaurants, cafes, groceries, etcetera) & redistribute freely to needy people through local food shelves & soup kitchens.

Before founding Community Driven & agreeing to be the Executive Director I’ve personally been doing food rescue work in the Twin Cities for several decades.

It started in the 1990’s with unofficial groups of people who would rescue food from local businesses & use it to cook free meals in public parks, going by the name “food not bombs”. In the late 1990’s I got involved with a more formal organization, a 501(c)3 nonprofit called Sisters’ Camelot which specifically rescued surplus organic food from organic produce distributors & gave it away freely in public parks. I worked for Sisters’ Camelot for well over a decade mostly running their fundraising operations & a commercial mobile kitchen (kitchen-bus) program where I helped build a mobile kitchen & served countless free meals at community events.

Unfortunately that project was basically ruined by a few people who exploited & union-busted their own employees in order to prop up their bloated administrative salaries. Most people (including myself) walked away from that project when they were in violation of federal labor laws in court in 2013, informing my firm position today that we don’t hire people unless we can pay them a livable wage & treat them with respect as workers.

After leaving Sisters’ Camelot in 2013, I founded the organization North Country Food Alliance which to this day rescues surplus food from larger grocery stores metro-wide & in 2019 I left that project to start Community Driven.

Community Driven was a natural step in my journey through the food rescue world. This project specifically moved my focus towards focusing more on the urban core of the Twin Cities, & targeting food waste from smaller businesses that are often overlooked by other food waste nonprofits. Organizations like North Country Food Alliance & Second Harvest do a great job rescuing surplus from the larger chain grocery stores, while the biggest overlooked sources of food waste in our communities seemed to be the smaller neighborhood businesses that these organizations did not work with.

Partially prepared food from restaurants & cafes, smaller neighborhood groceries where the surplus amount is too inconsistent for these larger organizations to have a truck stop by regularly, businesses that are honestly inconvenient for the food rescue nonprofits that already existed. At Community Driven we are actively seeking food that would not be rescued by any other organization instead of competing with them for the same larger chain grocery store surplus.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Community Driven represents a long journey for me where I have refused to be stagnant & comfortable instead of continuing to push forward.

In the 1990’s when I was doing “food not bombs” work I could have continued to consider my food rescue work as a weekend hobby. Instead I was determined to find a way to make this work my life’s mission & career, which lead me to seeking out employment at Sisters’ Camelot next.

At Sisters’ Camelot I could have kept my head down & tried not to rock the boat, but I saw people taking advantage of their fellow workers & I knew that this would hurt the long-term charitable work if ignored. I chose to do the more difficult thing & instead of simply staying quiet about worker exploitation and keeping my job safe I became a union organizer & organized my coworkers. I knew that charitable work propped up on the backs of exploited workers would eventually collapse in failure so I set out to save the long-term charitable work by confronting the worker exploitation. This labor dispute got really messy, but I knew that the flawed model of relying on exploitation of workers was bad for the charitable cause long-term so I stuck my neck out and eventually was written about in the Harvard Law Revue as the National Labor Relations Board’s star witness in a federal trial. If I never would have gotten involved in that labor struggle then both North Country Food Alliance & Community Driven would not exist today.

When Sisters’ Camelot basically imploded most of the striking workers joined me in the creation of a new organization called North Country Food Alliance (NCFA), which still exists today as a charity that rescues surplus food metro-wide mostly from larger grocery stores.

In 2019 I left North Country Food Alliance & started Community Driven.

Part of the reasoning for this was to focus more on the urban core of Minneapolis & Saint Paul. The other main aspect of this work that required creating a new organization was the need I saw to work with smaller neighborhood businesses that were falling through the cracks of the food rescue model at NCFA. NCFA did a very good job of rescuing surplus from medium to larger size grocery stores, but their operation was not well prepared to deal with smaller businesses with inconsistent surplus amounts, & more troublesome food for department of health handling criteria (like partially prepared foods). These smaller & more eclectic businesses were quickly becoming the Twin Cities’ biggest source of food waste while larger grocery stores were organized pretty fully into the food rescue world to the point where it was more a question of which food rescue group a grocery store works with rather than whether or not they were doing this work at all. We wanted to feel better about knowing that when we rescue food that it was surplus that really would go to waste if we didn’t do this work rather than rescuing food that would simply be picked up by a different existing organization if we didn’t….so we created & built Community Driven.

Every step along the way I could have stayed comfortable in my job & not taken risks moving forward. I didn’t do this, instead I kept putting my job on the line to seek out doing the work better. Each transition (from “food not bombs” to Sisters’ Camelot to NCFA to Community Driven represented taking huge risks & making drastic changes to do better at rescuing more food that would otherwise go to waste & distributing it to our most at-need neighbors in the Twin Cities.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Community Driven wouldn’t be here today without the hard work of both myself & Craig Drehmel, who has been with me during this chapter of my food rescue journey. I first met Craig in the local Arts & Music communities when I ran a local record label & Craig worked in the alcohol industry sponsoring & promoting local art installations & performances. I first recruited Craig into this work when I was at NCFA by convincing him to serve on our board of directors. When I left NCFA to create Community Driven Craig came with me & has been the Chair of our Board of Directors ever since our founding board meeting where the articles of incorporation I wrote were approved & I was hired as the Executive Director.

Craig is one of the most creative problem solvers I’ve ever known & I can’t imagine us getting to where we are without the constant organizing & networking Craig has been doing for Community Driven in the Twin Cities for the past three and a half years….& unlike most nonprofit board chairs Craig isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty & joins me twice a week in our food rescue van “Laura” personally doing the food rescue & distribution routes with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.community-driven.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/communitydrivenmn/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CommunityDrivenMN