Technology has turned car owners into cab drivers, and homeowners into hospitality managers. Now let's turn backyard gardeners into farmers.
The “zucchini problem”: the time of year you consistently find abandoned squash on your front porch, left there by some desperate neighbor. It’s this annoying, yet delicious, scenario that led three nonprofit organizations in Denver (Denver Food Rescue, Denver Urban Gardens, and Groundwork Denver) to invent Fresh Food Connect. Why should the highest quality, homegrown food go to waste instead of be eaten by neighbors who actually want it?
In 2016, the founding organizations partnered with social enterprise web-development firm CauseLabs to develop a simple online tool, which allowed backyard gardeners to easily schedule youth employees in Northeast Denver to pick up excess homegrown produce. The produce was distributed to various organizations serving food insecure populations in the area. In the first year, Fresh Food Connect’s bike-based youth employees picked up thousands of pounds of super high quality, local produce.
By the summer of 2017, Fresh Food Connect had received hundreds of requests from gardeners all over the world. In 2018, with the help of Whole Foods Market, Fresh Food Connect was able to export its technology to 8 organizations working throughout Colorado and Wyoming. We envision a one-of-a-kind virtual homegrown food hub, in which hyperlocal food can be traded or sold to businesses and individuals in your area, reducing the number of food miles your dinner has to undertake before being eaten.
I co-founded Fresh Food Connect and served as President of the Board through 2023.
