 Good afternoon, everyone. We'll begin in just a minute. We're waiting for people to zoom in. Well, tight. Hello, everyone. My name is Lauren Cubie. I'm with the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation. It's my honor to introduce our moderator for today, ASU's Kathleen Merrigan. She's director of the Sveedy Center for Sustainable Food Systems. Kathleen, thanks so much for moderating today. Hey, thank you, Lauren. We have the perfect presentation today, perfect presenter, perfect topic, because not everyone realizes that the first food bank in the United States, St. Mary's, opened in Phoenix in 1967. So what a perfect event to look at the history of food banks, food pantries in our country, led by Katie Martin, PhD, who has written a thrilling book. I've read it cover to cover. Very practical. All kinds of resources for you. All kinds of tips. I can't wait to hear her presentation. But first I have to give a little bit of background on her. That's what we do. Bottom line, Katie, by the way, writes, hunger is big. Community is bigger. That we need to reinvest as we provide charitable food in America. And she knows. She knows because she's had 25 years of experience and anti-hunger work. She is currently the executive director of Food Share Institute for Hunger Research and Solutions. She spent a whole lot of years researching food insecurity. In fact, she and I both share time at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. And we were both mentored by B. Rogers, among others. So I know that she's long in the tooth on these issues. She's visited food banks and food pantries across the countryside and created programs to deal with long-term solutions to hunger. So she's the author of this new book, which brings us to the stage here today, Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, New Tools to End Hunger. It is published by her friends at Island Press. Thank you very much, Island Press, for bringing this book to the world. I'm gonna turn this over to Katie for her presentation. I will remind you that we will have Q and A. That's a part of what we do in these sessions. So use the chat function, put those questions in there and Lauren will feed them to me and we'll get to as many of them as possible. Katie, welcome to our school. We're so pleased to have you. Thank you so much. I'm just really delighted to be here today and to talk about my new book. And I'll just take a moment to share with you. Let's see if I can advance my slide. Here we go. Just a minute about our Institute for Hunger Research and Solutions. We were formed about a year and a half ago in 2019 at Food Share, which is the regional food bank in Greater Hartford, Connecticut. And we just recently merged with the Connecticut Food Bank. So we now have one statewide food bank in Connecticut. And as an institute, we serve as a resource for other food banks, food pantries and community partners by providing strategies and programs as holistic solutions to hunger. If you're interested to learn more, I would encourage you to go on our website. We have monthly newsletters where we provide updates and we host monthly webinars kind of like this, where we bring in other colleagues and talk about various subjects. I think it's important, especially with this audience and the great work that you guys are doing with sustainable food systems to describe what this book is not about. Our federal food assistance programs, such as SNAP, Child Nutrition Programs are the first line of defense against hunger. A lot has been written about them. There's a lot of research on these federal food assistance programs. I strongly advocate for these programs and I reference them, but that is not the main focus of my book. There are other books that talk about community food systems like farmers markets and community gardens. A lot of attention on food policies related to food production, food marketing and advertising, and also emphasis on food waste and the environmental consequences of how we grow and produce our food. All of those topics are incredibly important and it sounds like a lot of the great work that you all do at ASU. That is not the focus of my book. My book is predominantly focused on our charitable food system. And by this, I mean our national network of food banks and food pantries. And as Kathleen mentioned, the very first food bank was developed right in Arizona, was a total pioneer in this work. And I've been working on this graphic this slide. It's not perfect yet, but I think it's helpful to describe the scope and the scale of this network. So Feeding America is a national organization based in Chicago and there are 200 regional food banks that are members of Feeding America. Food Chair in Connecticut Food Bank are members of Feeding America. And then my good colleague, Chris Costanza, who may be on this webinar today is the founder of Food Bank News who's done some really terrific research and identified that they're really the network of food banks includes about 170 additional food banks. So there are about 370 nationally that then collect and distribute food to over 61,000 food pantries and meal programs. That's probably a very low estimate. I'm sure those numbers are higher. This network then distributes food to millions of individuals who struggle with food insecurity. And it also involves millions of people as staff members, volunteers, food donors, financial donors. This food system of food banks and pantries is located in basically every community around the United States. And I think we have many opportunities here but as I put in my little parentheses perhaps a lot of missed opportunities. I think when we often think about nutritious food, when we think about food access and even food insecurity the charitable food system is sometimes overlooked and I'll describe some of the reasons why I think that is true. And I also think food banks and food pantries often work in a silo of focusing just specifically on food and we miss the opportunity to partner with other community organizations, agencies and programs to do our work more holistically. And I consider myself a scholar of the charitable food system. As Kathleen mentioned, I did my graduate work at the Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy. And I've dedicated my career to this focus of food insecurity and particularly within food banks and food pantries. And yet there's not a lot of literature on this food system. And I wanted to fill that gap. Part of my motivation for writing this book stems from many, many years ago. The large picture on the left is from a summer internship in 1994 when I interned for the Food Bank for New York City and this was right before I started graduate school. And during that summer, I visited over a hundred food pantries and soup kitchens and all five boroughs of New York. And I write about this at the beginning of my book of how on a beautiful morning in the summer I stepped off the subway and I was heading to a food pantry in Lower Manhattan. And this is what I saw. And this was way before the days of cell phones when I carried a camera with me to document some of my work. And this image and this experience has stuck with me and I've kept this photo for nearly 30 years. When I got closer to the line, I could see that the line stretched around the corner went way down the sideway on the right of this picture. And the people in the line would walk slowly, slowly to the front of the line. And the food pantry was located in the basement of one of these buildings. And if you know Manhattan, you can imagine this is one of those hatch doors that opens up onto the sidewalk. So not super glamorous. And the pantry was in the basement and I went down and there were volunteers who had pre-bagged the food and they would hand the food bag to bag assembly line from one volunteer to the next up the steps onto the sidewalk to the next person in line. And I can tell you that the volunteers were very well-meaning and the people receiving the food were very grateful for that food. But it was very clear to me then, as it's clear to me today, that there must be a better way to tackle the problem of food insecurity. And while this photo is super outdated, you can see from the picture on the right, you know, this is during COVID obviously, we're all messed up. And in many ways we're still providing the same type of system of charitable food. And my main why for writing this book, my motivation for why I've chosen to dedicate my career to food insecurity and specifically the charitable food system is for single moms and particularly black and Latina moms who are at the highest risk of food insecurity. I wanna make it easier for her to be able to not only have enough food but to thrive and so that we can break the cycle of poverty and food insecurity for the next generation. And I wanna start with, again, part of my motivation and part of my interest in this work, I spent most of my career in academia. After finishing my dissertation work, I worked at the University of Connecticut for about a decade and conducted research on food insecurity, worked with a lot of food pantries, bodegas, et cetera. And it's intriguing to me how little research has been conducted on charitable food. We have really rigorous information about food insecurity that's captured by the USDA and the Census Bureau every year. So we have really great estimates of the number of people who are food insecure. But we really turn a blind eye to the impact and outcomes of those who receive charitable food. And I think that's true for three main reasons. Number one, we continue to think about this work as an emergency response. And when you're focused on an emergency, you tend not to evaluate it. If there's a natural disaster, for example, like a hurricane, we're trying to get food and water and blankets to people as quickly as possible. So we don't take the time to evaluate it. And this is one of my concerns about the use of the term emergency is that this charitable food response has been evolving and growing for decades and the people who come to receive food, food pantries do so on a chronic basis. And therefore it's important for us to evaluate this work. Number two, I think we don't evaluate these programs because we really like the idea of providing food for people in our communities. We like the idea of quote unquote feeding the hungry. And there are a lot of benefits that people get from providing charitable food, corporate groups and food donors and other sponsors and scout groups and faith-based organizations who volunteer with food pantries and food banks feel really great about that charitable work. And we need those volunteers and those donors. But I think when we inherently think this is good it reduces our ability to put a critical eye and evaluate it. And I think that's a shame. And the third reason that I think we lack evaluation of our charitable food programs is in the way that we define and measure success within food banks and food pantries. And historically and even still today we typically measure the outputs of pounds as our key metric of success. So we can say year over year we've delivered more pounds of food into the community sometimes with the added benefit of saying that we're providing more food to more people. But the notion is that that output helps to define our success. And I think one of my key themes is that we're doing good work in the charitable food system but we can do better. And I describe in the book I encourage readers to dream bigger and aim higher in our work not just with evaluation but in the way that we provide services. And some of the key themes are shifting from sympathy towards empathy. Sympathy meaning I feel sorry for you this must be really hard. This must be really embarrassing to empathy where we build relationships with individuals to try to understand the root causes of wider struggling and to help connect them to additional services. Shifting from a focus on pounds of food to the nutritional quality of food. Shifting from an emergency response towards one of empowerment. And again with emergency the idea is we just have to keep our head down and focus on providing as much food as quickly as possible to helping build relationships and empowering people to become more food secure and self-sufficient. And finally from a focus of a transaction of food simply like moving that bag of food through the pantry line to handing to a person to a transformation of lives. And what that can look like I'm giving you just kind of an overview here of these are highlights of the chapters in my book. And as the title describes this is about reinventing. This is about thinking differently about the way that we've approached the issue of hunger and what's possible if we think differently about this. I spend a whole chapter talking about the language that we use to describe our work. And I provide some examples of how we can use different terminology and different language that is more empowering is more person centered. The first example there is emergency. Please, please for all of you here if you can get on the bandwagon let's stop using the term emergency for this chronic response to food insecurity. I also talk a great deal about what it feels like when you go into a food pantry. What's the culture like? What does it look like and feel like? And I describe this as the culture that could be shifting from a humiliating or embarrassing experience to one that can be welcoming and dignified. And this is where we talk a lot about customer service and hospitality in the way that we provide food because honestly the people who are coming to food pantries they're choosing to go and they are guests or customers. And if we do our jobs right they're gonna want to come back and tell their friends about it. If we do our job poorly they're likely not gonna keep coming back to get help. I am a huge advocate for client choice. And in traditional food pantries like some of the ones that I showed on the images, the pictures this is where volunteers prebag the food and then everyone who comes through the line receives the same exact standardized bag of food. It's a best practice to allow people to choose their food with dignity like they would at a grocery store. I think this is really, really important. It says a lot about the culture of a food pantry whether or not you offer choice. Thankfully there's been a lot of emphasis and attention on the link between hunger and health. Food insecurity and chronic diseases both physical health and mental health. And there are a lot of really, really great examples I probably could have written an entire book around promoting healthy food within the charitable food system. And there's some great tools and examples that are being adopted nationally to rank food nutritionally within food banks and food pantries. So there's a lot of energy here. It's also important when we think about why people come to a food pantry. Yes, they're coming for food but that's the tip of the iceberg that there are a host of underlying reasons of why they're struggling to get food for their family. So I describe how we can connect people with additional community services and provide more of a one-stop shopping experience with wrap-around services. And we have evidence from some really great research that we have evaluated and scaled in different food pantries to offer more than food with coaching and using social work skills with motivational interviewing and helping people to become more self-sufficient. As I mentioned, volunteers are critical to this network of food banks and food pantries. And it's important to think about the way volunteers function at a food pantry. And it's a necessary component of this work but I've seen some unfortunate examples of how we can design food pantries more for the convenience of our volunteers than the convenience and experience of the people that we're serving who are food insecure. So I provide some strategies and ideas around trainings for volunteers. I talked about measurement and evaluation and how there's so much room for growth here in this field to help evaluate these types of best practices to identify what types of food pantries are more effective at increasing food security and increasing mental health status or health outcomes. I talk a fair amount about inequality and systems change and this has become so apparent due to the COVID pandemic and also our recent attention on racial injustice and Black Lives Matter. And I feel very fortunate that I was still writing my book when we witnessed the murder of George Floyd because it enabled me to more clearly articulate how structural racism and systemic injustices both create and perpetuate food insecurity. So if we're really talking about ending hunger, we need to tackle these problems head on and spend more time talking about them. While we look externally at that systems change, that policy change, we can also promote equity from within. So looking within food pantry settings, within food banks of who serves on the board and whose voices are heard, who's making decisions, how do we build more equity, diversity, inclusion within the charitable food system? And there are a lot of exciting opportunities for new partnerships. In particular, I highlight how healthcare systems are increasingly seeing the connection between food insecurity as a social determinant of health and are engaging more with food banks and even providing food pantries on site within clinics and hospitals. Similarly, community colleges and universities are recognizing that a lot of their students are not only just struggling with student debt, but struggling with food insecurity. So there are opportunities for new types of partnerships. These are the types of topics that I address. You can see it is, it's diverse. I kind of, it's kind of soup to nuts. And one of the themes from my book is take one step. That there are many, many action steps that you can take in your community to reinvent the way that we provide charitable food. And I encourage readers to not get intimidated, but just get started with this work. So while there's not one silver bullet, there are many different ways that you can get involved. And here are just some visual examples. Sometimes, you know, pictures are worth a thousand words. Some examples of model food pantries that are promoting healthy food, who are offering client choice, who are providing wraparound services. And again, there is, I cite a fair amount of research that we've conducted. There's plenty of room for additional research and evaluation. And as you think about the different components of this massive charitable food system, there are many different ways to reinvent from the food that is donated to the role of food banks to collect and distribute that food, how we distribute that food in food pantry settings so that we can hopefully put that single mom at the heart and center of all that we do to make it easier for her and her kids. And as Kathleen mentioned, this is my book. And I'm just thrilled that it is now available. And I look forward to hearing from folks of what they think. And if you, I know we're gonna get into Q&A next, but I would encourage you to get updates on more of the work that we do at the Institute. You can subscribe to the Institute to get our newsletter and sign up for webinars. And I've got my email address here on the screen. Great. Thank you, Katie. So while people are scrambling to put questions in the Q&A, I wanted to start with a few of my own. And as I read your book, you brought up one of my favorite all-time movies, The Wizard of Oz. And I want you to explain to people why in writing this book, The Wizard of Oz came to your mind and what we should learn from the movie as it relates to charitable work that we're all involved in. I love that you brought that up. Well, and just to share, when I was doing the writing, often I enjoy going for a run and I would often, would be on a run, I would come up with some crazy idea and think, okay, I gotta write this one down. I talk about helping to connect individuals to other community services. And we do this through coaching. And I describe how the role of a coach, we do training for coaches, which is strength-based and helping to help an individual identify what are the goals that he or she has for their life? What are the things that they wanna work on? Rather than the coach saying, this is what you need to do, these are the goals that you should set, but inherently letting that come out of the person. So for me, I love the Wizard of Oz on so many levels, but I liken it to how Dorothy and the quirky characters within the Wizard of Oz, they're all searching for something outside of themselves. Dorothy is looking to find a way back home, the scarecrow is looking for a brain, et cetera. And the moral of the story is they support one another, they boost each other's confidence and their ability to tackle these problems on their own. And lo and behold, they held the tools and the keys for their own success, that they had this within them all along. And so it's the role of a coach within a food pantry to help draw that out of an individual because often we just have to click our heels. So I love that, but I also remember those really scary monkeys in the movie. And so I'm wondering, also in your book, you say that we all wanna go beyond just giving the fish, as we all learned about teaching people to fish, but then you quickly follow up and say, but sometimes there are a lot of sharks in the water and we need to recognize that. What are you telling us there? Yeah, so there is this common American saying of, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right? And the idea of when we think about the issue of hunger and food insecurity, we think, okay, what we really need to do is teach a man to fish because if we provide education, then that person will have the skills and the ability to fish and catch their own food and then they can eat for a lifetime. But then we go on to say, education is not in and of itself often enough. We need to make sure that there are available jobs, that there is affordable healthcare, childcare, other resources as part of that social safety net. So even if someone has the education and the knowledge of helping themselves get ahead, we also have to look at systemic issues and policy change to make that possible. Well, that's a perfect segue. So today the house just passed the big COVID relief bill and it will go to the president to be signed, I'm sure, post-haste and we're all desperately awaiting that help from the government. But you do in your book make the point that in some ways we've gotten so focused on this charitable enterprise that we have taken ourselves off the hook, I think this is an actual expression you use, from really paying mine to the broader social safety net issues. And as we all know, part of the COVID relief debate was whether or not to have a $15 minimum wage dropped out because of the Senate parliamentarians' objections to that rulemaking sort of stuff. But I just want you to comment on that. And I also do so because you cite Andy Fisher's book, Big Hunger, which I have my graduate students read portions of, and he critiques the food bank, food pantry, enterprise as being somewhat unwilling to critique the current system because a lot of their donors might become offended and therefore it's biting the hand that feeds you or what have you. So that's a whole messy kind of question, but if you can kind of figure out a way to put some coherence to it, I'd appreciate it. It's a great question. I appreciate the logic. So many people have been critical of the charitable food system because they say it's a stark example of how the government has failed. And I, as an early researcher, have been throughout my career influenced by Jan Poppendike's wonderful work, Sweet Charity. And she writes about this of, it's an example of how shouldn't the government be providing that safety net to enable people to have enough food? So we're taking the government off the hook. I think that's true, but I also think over the last several decades, we in the charitable food system took ourselves off the hook too, as opposed to raising awareness for the importance of a social safety net and a living wage, a minimum wage. A minimum wage should really be the minimum by which you can afford to provide for your family that has not kept pace. So I argue that we within charitable food could be doing a lot more to advocate for those types of changes. And I would say too, it's, we should focus on the government's role, but it's also, let's not forget the corporate and private sector role as well. So for example, even if we pass a $15 minimum wage, and I really, really hope we do, let's, you know, there's room, it doesn't have to be in this COVID relief bill, we need to do that work. That is anti-hunger work for sure. Corporations often, many of the larger ones that Andy talks about in his book, you know, will choose to pay people not full time so that they don't have to have benefits and other supports. So there's a lot of room, not just for the government response, but also corporate response as well. Great. So I'll take one last question and I'll go to the audience because they're popping in. And they're both, it's kind of a two-parter, two related questions, because I know a lot of the people that have joined our seminar are actually in the business, the food pantry business, the food bank business, yay. But you say two things that are a little unsettling maybe for some of this population here on our seminar. One is you say, it may be time to think about consolidating smaller pantries to pool resources. And the second thing that you say is we also need to look internally, and I think you used the example of carpet versus concrete, but to what extent are we in our day-to-day operations really deeply connecting with issues of equity within our ranks? Right. I don't think the idea of consolidation will be very new for many of my food bank colleagues. It probably will be for some of the food pantry colleagues that are on the front lines of this. And I start off my book by really starting with a lot of gratitude and for all of you out there, my colleagues in crime, those of us on the front lines doing this work, thank you, thank you for all that you do. I just think it's important to know our history and how we got here as a network. So unlike our federal food assistance programs that are highly regulated, standardized, our charitable food network is very ad hoc, community-based, and there's so much beauty in that, and we wanna keep a lot of that. Yet what happens is you have food pantries that spring up kind of wherever there's a group of people who choose to host one. And one of the things that became really clear in our network here in greater Hartford during COVID was in the city of Hartford itself. On paper, we have over 50 food pantries in a relatively small urban center. But many of them were open one time a month, twice a month, run fully by volunteers. And so many of those smaller pantries had to close during COVID. And it's harder for people to access these programs when they're open so infrequently. So the idea of consolidation, if we really wanna get serious about doing this work better, I think that's critical. And I talk a lot about different ways that we can do that, not just to close the doors, but say, how can we work together to join other groups to share resources? And then the notion of the carpet versus concrete, I learned that from another food banker. And sometimes it's referred to as the upstairs versus downstairs. So within our food banks were massive warehouses. And so typically the more blue collar frontline jobs are on the concrete and downstairs. And the more executive white collar type of jobs are on carpet and upstairs. And it just can create some power dynamics. And if we want to include the voices of people who may need our help, it's important to hear a diverse group of people both within our communities and within our own four walls. Great. So we have a few different questions on choice. And I know that you write that your experiences that when choice is the way that food is distributed, it works 100% of the time. But you have a couple of questions. One is, have you seen a best model on choice? And the other question is, how has choice been impacted during COVID? Our whole world's upside down. And how is that playing out? I'll say for me personally, when COVID hit, it was like a gut punch particular on so many levels, but particularly in this work that client choice was like the first thing to go. And I understand from a public health perspective, it absolutely makes sense. I'm really hopeful that my book is coming out at exactly the right time as we're kind of coming on the other side that we can be hopeful to reintroduce client choice into our programs. Is there a best model for client choice? You know, it's a little hard to say because I love the adage, when you've seen one food pantry, you've seen one food pantry. And so the layout, the design, the flow, they're gonna look different in each individual setting. I have a colleague, Dave Reed, who works at the Worcester County Food Bank in Massachusetts. And he used to work at Starbucks. And he talks about how when you're trained as a barista, you're not just trained on the register, but you're trained on customer service. And he does trainings for his agency, staff members, the food pantries in his network. And he talks about putting yourself in the shoes of the people who come to visit your food pantry. So if you're thinking about client choice, he might encourage you to think about the flow. How would it look when people are coming into your program? The other cool thing with client choices, it's an easy way also to think about healthy nudges and using behavioral economics to promote healthy food and think like a marketer to put the healthy food at the most convenient areas so that they're really beautiful and just like the marketers do in our grocery stores. I think the more that you can have it look and feel like a grocery store experience, so there's less stigma, the better. And I provide some great tools, there's some resources of other folks that have like manuals and tips for designing a client choice pantry. Great. You have a question about our customers at our food pantries, also being volunteers. Do you recommend that? Are there any insights we should have for that kind of work? That's a great question. Yes, and I provide examples of how I think the short answer is yes, I definitely recommend allowing the people who are receiving food at a food pantry to also serve as volunteers. I think there's a huge amount of benefit that can come from that. You can break down the barriers between us and them, give her a receiver. You're more likely to have folks that are from the community speaking the same language as others. I describe how important it is for volunteer training for everyone within a food pantry setting regardless of whether they're a guest or someone else from the community who's not food insecure. I have seen some examples where people who have so little autonomy over their lives can kind of overstep in the role of a volunteer and being bossy and being rude to other guests. And the way I frame it is, they just have probably not had that type of ability to have that authority in other areas of their life. So that's an example of where some good training could come into play. Great. So a question about faith-based institutions who are hosting food pantries. Is that an asset or a limitation? I know at one point in your book you raise issues around certain populations feeling unwelcome perhaps out of depending on the faith-based institution. Anyhow, if you could reflect on that, that's a question from the crowd. Yeah. I would say, and there's kind of limited data on this, the Hunger in America study that was conducted by Feeding America at the last one was in 2014. So it's a little outdated. I wanna say over half of the food pantry network was faith-based. I could be off on that number though, so don't quote me. But absolutely, there's so many faith-based organizations that this is part of your mission. This is the way that you serve. So in many ways it can be an asset. To that point of exclusion or feeling not welcoming, I cite the example of the Oregon Food Bank that is such a leader on equity and diversity work. They recognize that faith-based organizations, let's say churches, may not be the most welcoming for folks in the LGBTQ community who may feel outside of that network. So the Oregon Food Bank took this as an opportunity to talk with their network to recognize this could be an issue and if we wanna be inclusive, there are some strategies that we can do to make it seem more welcoming and affirming. So they went through a training, they go through steps to do that, and then they have a decal, a rainbow decal that they put on their food pantry signage to let people know, we welcome you and we want you here. So I would say more often than not, more often than not it's an absolute asset to have faith-based organizations involved. So I know your work and focus has been charitable organizations in the United States, but are you seeing anything in Canada or Europe or anywhere else in the world that we should be aware of keeping our eye on for innovation? Yeah, look north. Look north. If you haven't read The Stop by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis, I would read my book first, read my book first, but then pick up Nick's book. It came about out about seven years ago and it's phenomenal, Nick is from Toronto and he worked at a food pantry called The Stop. And when he came in, it's similar to a lot of experiences that I've seen here in the States where you have a new leader, a new director of a food bank or food pantry who comes in and asks a lot of great questions. Why do we do it this way? Could we do it differently? Why are we doing it? Why have we been always doing it this way? And he just really reinvented the way they provided food and that model that he started in the small food pantry in Toronto has become a national community food center movement. It is partially, I believe, funded from the federal government and they have models that are in place to build this community food center technique. So yes, Canada is a great model. And it's interesting too, I think there is a global food bank network and there are other countries that I think look to the United States as a model for so many things including charitable food. And my hope is that when they look to us, they may look to more of the innovative evidence-based practices that we're doing and not necessarily how food banking started years and years ago. So I saw it in the chat that's going on. One of my students, one of my undergrad students says the stop is such a great book. I have to say I haven't read it. So now I'm outed myself and my undergrads are ahead of me. That happens actually quite a bit. It really makes me just want to raise the observation that you have in your book that a lot of people who are running food pantries across the country are nearing retirement age. So for all the students who may be in this seminar, give them a little pitch. Yeah, we need you. We need your energy. We need your focus on food justice. We need your innovation. We need your creativity. Yes, all of it. I've had the pleasure. We have this fantastic undergraduate student from Georgetown who was working completely. She's from Connecticut. And like many students this year was working completely from home and wanted to use her time wisely. And she's interned with me and she's fantastic. And she's constantly coming up with new ideas and weighted spin things. So one example that I give in the book is that if we describe our work in food banks and food pantries as always centered around the food, then young adults are gonna look at it like, you know, like I may not be interested in just shelving food. If we frame our work as food justice as creating a more equitable approach to reducing poverty, then I think we can engage more young adults who say I wanna be part of that mission. So please get on board. Great. Can you tell us a little bit more your thoughts about moving from the, I mean, you made the point that metrics are really important. We gotta get the metrics right. So moving from sort of assessing our work from the pounds of food delivered to the nutritional value. How do we do that? We have a great new tool. I am excited to say that a year ago, healthy eating research, which is a project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They convened two years ago, they convened a panel of nutritionists and food bank staff members. And I was proud to serve on the panel. And it was focused on nutrition ranking for the charitable food system. And we spent about a year, a year ago, these new rankings were announced and they aligned very closely with this stoplight system that I've developed a few years ago called SWAP, supporting wellness at pantries. So SWAP is now 100% aligned with these new healthy eating research guidelines that rank food based on saturated fat, sodium and sugars, which are on the back of every nutrition label. And so we can identify food that should be chosen often, sometimes or rarely. And we have tools for helping food banks and food pantries to do just that, to rank their food. And then the cool thing is, it's both upstream and downstream. So the downstream approach can be for nutrition education and providing promotional material. So the people who are shopping at a food pantry can identify which food is healthy for their family, diabetes friendly, et cetera. But it's also upstream so that we can run reports to identify, what is the quality of our food? And then we can talk with our food donors to encourage them to donate healthier food so we can increase the supply. Cool. So I lived through the capillary of food bank when they took their position on sheet cakes. Yes. So, and you connect it very well in your book in terms of issues around wasted food and piping back up to management. Can you share that with us? Yeah, so within the charitable food system, we rely very heavily on donations and predominantly from the retail sector from food manufacturers and grocery stores. And the Capital Area Food Bank, you know, I've heard Nancy Roman when she was the director there, she's now the CEO of Partnership for Healthy America. When she was at the food bank, they had created a nutrition policy and were really focused on promoting healthy food, but they had a lot, a lot, a lot of sheet cake. And by that, I mean like the massive kind that, you know, you serve at a family birthday party or a company outing and they just didn't really wanna distribute that to their, you know, individual households. So they were stockpiling it at the food bank and the warehouse and so she went to the grocery store chain and said, we really would like you to donate less sheet cake. Well, the manager at the grocery store had no idea because the donations left the supermarket, they're obviously perishable food, it's cake. So it would leave their stores, they didn't see it was kind of out of sight, out of mind. And this is where it's important is empowering not just individuals for their own wellbeing, but as organizational leaders, empowering ourselves to have those conversations with food donors, with financial donors. I think for a long time we have been hesitant because we feel like we should just be grateful, we should just say thank you for all of our donations. But the reality is they want to be, many of them want to be good corporate sponsors. And that's where, you know, especially with Andy Fisher's great work with Big Hunger, I do think some of that has been changing over the last five years or so, particularly around nutritious food, that I think there's a movement towards trying to donate healthier food. I also love that you suggest if you end up with a sheet cake, maybe what you do is you slice it up and share it with your guests, customers, whatever your pantry uses as the appropriate term. And because we want these places to be welcoming community hubs where people feel whole and happy and so I like that. And I've never seen that in action. That's just in my head that feels good. I do realize that there are probably some food safety issues and some other things. But, you know, I think there's a place and, you know, with our swap system, with the stoplight system, I talk frequently. The red food, it doesn't mean no. We all like red food. We all like to, you know, enjoy a treat, but there are different ways to do it in a dignified fashion. So so many people in this past COVID year saw those horrendous lines at food banks and you write a really important section on the lottery system. Now a lot of the people here are familiar with the lottery system, but some are. And can you describe that and why that's so important and particularly important during this onslaught of food insecure people going perhaps for the first time to pantries for help? Yeah, I think it ties into, I also write about the scarcity mentality. So we see this a lot when you're struggling with food insecurity and poverty, you focus on lack. You focus on a scarcity. There just isn't enough food. There isn't enough, you know, resources. And if you don't have enough, that's a form of trauma and you worry about having enough for your family. And we see this a lot. And I'm gonna reference it more from before COVID of traditional food pantries. And I see this most often in the pantries that are open the least amount of days and the least amount of time in a week. So if you're open for a two hour window, usually people will line up hours in advance with the idea that they may run out of food. And so I wanna be front on the line to make sure that there's gonna be enough food for my family. When we're trauma informed, we can appreciate and understand why that's the case. And this is a common scenario for food pantries, but we don't want people waiting outside in a line for a really long time. So an innovative model and not always super popular model initially is to do a lottery system. So and it's ideal if you can let people know in advance that this is gonna happen and you probably have to work out the kinks for a little bit. But basically you start at the front of the line and people pick out numbers like they would from a lottery and then you just start with number one and you say, okay, whoever here is number one in line you get to be first. And the idea is like any given week that number is gonna change. It disincentivizes people to show up super early because we wanna reinforce that there's gonna be enough food and we don't want people standing in line for that long. Great. There is a question here about how you deal with culturally relevant food. We have a lot of different populations. Some who have different religious beliefs about food. Some who have just embedded culture around food are food pantries, food banks able to address that. And if so, how? Yeah, I think it's a challenge in terms of the food supply because we rely so heavily on donated food that is sporadic and haphazard. But just like so many things that I write about in the book it's important to hear from the people that you serve. So a strategy can be, I mean this seems really kind of old school and basic but I don't think it's commonplace to do some kind of simple questionnaire of the people that are coming to your food pantry to ask about their cultural preferences. What types of food are they most looking for? What are the things they're not looking for? When you have a client choice pantry you're gonna see more of those things because if no one's choosing it then there really isn't demand. So that is one way to help indicate which things are more culturally appropriate. You know, we try to lean away from a lot of miscellaneous food drives but what can be great is if you gather that information from the people you serve to understand like here are a few key things that are culturally appropriate and more challenging for people to afford and access. Can you do a food drive specifically for those items? So it also is gonna help inform your community. You know, like let's not assume that everybody wants a can of tuna and a jar of peanut butter, right? You know, let's think differently about that are common food drives and you know, again, don't just offer it up for any type of miscellaneous food drive but tailor it more to the clientele. One last and quick question because we're running out of time and as I asked this, I wanna remind everybody there are a lot of references put into the chat room including a link to how to buy Katie's wonderful book. So my last question, you quote someone who says you wouldn't put a bandaid on a gunshot wound and I think that captures a lot of what your book is aiming at. So what's our, what are our marching orders? And you give a lot of direction in your book but what's the big picture? What's our marching orders as we close out today? Yeah, let's think more holistically about the work that we do. Let's partner with other groups collaborating because we can't do this work alone. It's not just about the food. Millions of people are hungry in America but they're hungry for community. They're hungry for justice. They're hungry for a better life. So let's collaborate with others to help them get there. Beautifully put. Katie, thanks so much for your wonderful work, your insights, your tips. It's a great volume. I hope everybody gets it on their bookshelves as soon as possible. It's been such a pleasure having you at Arizona State University. And again, just down the road from St. Mary's to our first in the country, we're all trying to innovate and do better. And hopefully this is a book that will also be read by the Biden-Harris administration. Yes, to your words, to your mouth, to their ears. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks everybody for attending. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Kathleen, thank you. That was wonderful. Yeah, well, thank you. It was a great, great talk. I think people enjoyed it. Great. Could I have access to the chat box? Do you think someone could copy and paste that for it, you know, or like download? Cause I didn't pay attention to it.