 Welcome to Feed More Tech Talks event. I'm Susan Tenby. I've been working at TechSoup since the year 2000. It's been pretty much my only job. I have worked here since we launched. We were an organization called CopyMentor before we became TechSoup in 2000 and I am the Director of Global Community. I've been doing online communities things at this organization since we launched. And TechSoup, a global organization and we've been eclipping nonprofits with the solutions that they need to build a more equitable world for over 30 years. From discounted tech products and services to articles, webinars, courses and more, we deliver the training and tools nonprofits need to be better, stronger and faster for transforming their communities. Together with our partners around the world, we've actually reached 1.3 million organizations and we've delivered more than 16 billion US dollars of tech tools and services to date. We're currently in 236 countries. We're in 39 languages. And with the help of our global network, we have 62 partners who help us share our work and services across the world. And you can learn more about the TechSoup global network and our global partners at tsgn.org. So a little bit about today, part of what we do is we connect nonprofits with each other. So we don't just connect nonprofits to technology. We also connect nonprofits to each other and being part of that network means that we cross paths with lots of smart, passionate people. And today's guest, Allison Schill, is one of those smart and passionate people. And I just spent time with Allison at the ReFed Summit in Minneapolis last week. And Allison is the CEO of the Food Donation app, Carrot. And Carrot uses technology to connect edible surplus food in businesses directly to local nonprofits and provides donation data tracking tools for nonprofits, municipalities, and corporations to meet state mandates and corporate social responsibility initiatives. She's passionate about reconnecting all members of the community and healing through food. Today she's gonna share lessons and opportunities for organizations that tackle hunger. Welcome, Allison, let's dive in. So tell me, first of all, I'd like some background. Tell me why is food insecurity been a focus of your work? How did you arrive at this work? Thanks, I'm so excited to be here today and talk with all of you. So it all started for me. I was working in the waste industry for recycling and sustainability. And I was in the city of New York when Hurricane Sandy came through and just devastated all of the coastal communities in New York City. There were so many donations coming in from all over the country and all these little pop-up nonprofit organizations that were trying to help their communities, those people that lost everything in their lives. But there was no real rhyme or reason to where the donations were going. And there was a huge misallocation of where all the resources were supposed to be. So we ended up with piles of clothing just on the streets in the beaches where cars were buried in sand and food going, like certain type of food going to one place and diapers going to another place. And there was no way to really communicate between the two. So later when I got involved in food waste working for a cleaning nonprofit in California called Food Forward, and I realized there really needed to be a network of all of the nonprofit organizations across the country without any sort of exclusivity which is the only kind of collaboration I had seen previously. So I created Carrot and got involved in the LA Food Policy Council to start working on not only local policies but also state policies like SB 1383 and have just taken off since then. Oh, cool. And congratulations on having such a successful organization come out of seemingly a situation that was terrible but you had a great idea and you made a solution that is now scaling. So why don't you tell us a little bit about SB 1383 and how it aims to reduce edible food waste in California? Yeah, SB 1383 was introduced a number of years ago, I think in 2016, and really it comes out of the greenhouse gas initiatives that California is taking on. So one of the major contributors to greenhouse gases, the third largest man-made contributor is methane emissions from landfills. So SB 1383 is aiming for edible food in particular to increase the amount of edible food waste that is currently being disposed by 20% in 2020 or 20, I think it's 2025, 23 and I think, sorry, yes, by 2025 and that's a statewide rule. And they're doing that by having a number of mandates. Some of the mandates are on the individual donors themselves, so certain types of food entities such as grocery stores, wholesale food producers, warehouses that do distribution and then a lot of the restaurants that are hospitals, hotels, schools, you name it, like the ones that have a lot of food are all mandated now to donate their maximum amount of edible food. And they also have to keep records of all their food donations, of all the partners that they have food donations with and they have to have a written agreement in place with the non-profit organizations that are rescuing their food. In addition to that, non-profits have to have records of all of the food donations they're getting in from these tier one and tier two generators is what they're called here. And then the jurisdiction is that they're all residing and have to basically give inspections and give resources and do a bunch of other things like capacity planning in order to make this all work. So it's a really stringent kind of regulation to force a certain amount of people into donating food, which is, I don't know, really exciting. So how is the implementation status going in California for SB 1383? So that's on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis right now. Definitely there are larger jurisdictions and areas that have a running start on this, like the San Francisco Bay Area and the Silicon Valley area definitely have a lot more experience and a lot more resources available for them. So they've been doing a good job rolling it out. But a lot of other cities, this is a new concept to them. They haven't really experienced this kind of a waste. They have experience in recycling. A lot of cities have experienced somewhat in compost, but never in donating food. So a lot of people are asking carrot and other types of services like that for health and guidance in navigating this. Not only that, but actually kind of help when you state itself, this is new to them. So they're having to take a lot of time listening to the feedback of the constituents, all the stakeholders involved to make sure that the law is not prohibiting people from doing what they're supposed to do, which is feeding people and is really enhancing the program instead. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just gonna ask what your experience was with the rollout, with the program rollout. Yeah, and so this has been great for me because I've been involved with it through the very beginning. I was able to create a tool that takes into effect all of the different stakeholders and create an open network that is basically carried to a free app that anyone that's a nonprofit organization can join and rescue food for free. And then anyone who's a food donor can also sign up and post feed for free. And then there's some other aspects of carrot that allow for cities to be able to travel, the donations in their area and for larger human profits to be able to do things as well. So my experience has been that as people are rolling, as cities are rolling this out, as long as they have the partnerships in place to do it, there's a good chance for success. But there's some cities that are trying to roll it out right now and meeting a lot of resistance and there's a lot of resistance in the collaboration aspect of it too. Some nonprofit organizations are not wanting to give the information that they're supposed to because they want to protect their donors. Some donors are doing what's calling back calling, which is where they take all the food that wasn't sold, take it back to one central warehouse location and where usually that warehouse is not anywhere near edible food like recovery organizations that can redistribute it out quickly. And so that food might have during that transportation time inspired and not been good to use anymore. So there's a real big learning curve that everyone's going through. So you mentioned that challenge of the food expiring. What other challenges have you faced and also what solutions have you come out of those challenges during the implementation? Absolutely, yeah. So the rollout definitely like any state that's thinking about doing this needs a lot of data, not only beforehand, but during the actual process of onboarding users. I think that one of the great things that CalRecycle did for this was during the whole process leading up to this, they allowed for a lot of public comment and public feedback. And they really were helping to determine how is the policy going to affect the different stakeholders involved and then adjusting things as necessary. Like at one point in time, they were going to have all the nonprofit organizations trying to record exactly how much of their food that they rescued was then having to be composted and like non-perfectively, we have no ability to do that. We're stretched up under pay. I think that also they should have maybe brought in some other stakeholders as well because now we're running into some problems where corporations weren't necessarily brought in and this is a little bit new to us or a lot of the different grocery stores or restaurant associations are like we have no idea what this is at all and how to do it. And then things like pig feed were not brought into the equation as a viable solution for feed waste either donated or composted. So we're trying to work our way through these growing pains of learning what was wrong. There's a couple of other things I wanted to mention too that there were some things that were outlined in the original policy and then it was supposed to start on January 1st, 2020. But now we had to go back on some of the things where they did go back on things and people like, hey, what's going on? Because this is so new and it's so flexible, it's been very confusing for a lot of the municipalities and a lot of the stakeholders involved. And I think that's a lesson that can be learned for other states moving forward is what we've experienced here in California can be then sent as a lesson. So how do you think, based on that, how do you think it's going to influence policy in other states? California has definitely been a leader in a lot of these types of kind of ladle paradigm shifts. But I think that one of the biggest things is that we have provided California has definitely integrated a lot of funding opportunities for municipalities, for own profit organizations to increase their scope, increase their capacity of the edible food that they're able to serve, increase the amount of trucks and staff that they have. And then also it's created a lot of infrastructure that wasn't there before, so just care it. Like now that there is this free online platform where data can be generated and everybody can, without any sort of exclusivity, be able to cost and rescue food, other states will be able to adopt it a lot quicker. And I think that one of the most important things is that as corporations like the big box chain grocery stores are involved in this and learning about it, there'll be a value proposition added for them as a whole corporate entity to enable a more robust and stronger feed donation practice within all of their stores across the nation. So it'll be easier to adopt when other states get into that. And one other thing I really wanted to mention is there's a disaster preparedness aspect to it. So when disaster hits, a lot of cities are scrambling, where are my resources? Where are my places that can help me redistribute the resources? And having this kind of network already set up will really help there. And previously the status quo of food donation has always been about one nonprofit saying how many pounds of food that they've been able to rescue and then basing their grants off of that. This is hopefully shifting that a little bit away from this growth growing towards monopolization into more of how can we really hone it down to local resilient communities that are able to have their different nutrition needs met and have all of their smaller relationships between the food producers and the redistributors of that food in one small area. Okay, cool. This super interesting stuff. Before I move to the audience Q&A, I'm going to just ask you one more question which is how can people in the room help you? What is your call to action to those listening? Yeah, if there are any nonprofit organizations in the room right now that are looking for a free food donation app and definitely in the future too as we get more and more donors involved in different areas and definitely sign up for carrot. It's C-A-R-E-I-T. You can download it on your phone and create a donation profile or a nonprofit profile for free and just spread the word about how food donation can be a non-exclusive, non-monopolized experience across the United States. Okay, cool. Thank you so much. I'm going to switch to ask some audience questions right now and then we'll get back to the presentation just hopping into the questions. David Porter asked what liability from food poisoning are companies facing with SB 1383? So SB 1383 does speak into account that if the food is not safe to eat, it should not be donated. If nonprofits still have to use their best judgment and other safety protocols in place, there is education that is being distributed by the municipalities and they're hired consultants to go out and do that education about what safe food should be donated. And if food is not safe or is honestly, they're too full of a certain type of food, it's can be rejected. And that is absolutely allowed within SB 1383 that food is rejected by the nonprofits. They still have the ability to say, no, I don't want to serve that. So other than we have the Good Samaritan Act, which is obviously the dilemmas in Good Samaritan Act country-wide, California also has its own California Good Samaritan Act which protects donors from liability that if they donate food in good faith that it will not get somebody sick, they will not be held liable. Okay, thank you. So the next question comes from the Food Brigade, to which Cappine, in light of record keeping requirements placed on participating nonprofits, do you have any numbers on the percentage of hunger relief organizations that are participating thus far? And as context, I know that a lot of patrons here in New Jersey do not accept food from the major food banks here because they do not want to deal with the restrictive paperwork requirements and or do not take food from TEF AP because of the necessary record. I can only speak to my own personal experience. A lot of cities right now are hiring CARAT because we offer that free record keeping compliance tool for nonprofit organizations. Obviously the Feeding America Network has the Meal Connect app and people have access to that. That's a kind of ongoing debate right now of whether or not Feeding America food banks are willing to share that data with surrounding communities and their food recovery organizations that are working with them. But I think that because CARAT has that free aspect where a nonprofit is automatically able to comply, a donor is automatically able to comply, that's why people are hiring me. Other nonprofit organizations that are like, we just simply don't have the staff to even think about this and we're only really able to take things that are dropped off on our door, they don't have to participate in SB 1383. But unfortunately that also means that they're not able to take food donations from those tier one regulated and tier two regulated food donors. And those donations instead have to be diverted to a nonprofit that is participating in SB 1383. I hope that answers your question. We're all here today because we're committed to feeding our communities. For many of us it's getting harder and harder to keep up with the growing demand and costs. We spent last year interviewing about a dozen 62 organizations learning from them. And these were organizations that food to people who need it, just like yours. And we listened to them and we wanted to make sure that we could help them as TechSoup. So what we heard is not surprisingly, nonprofits just like yours wanna connect with each other. They wanna get advice on things pertaining to the unique needs of their organization, such as for example, how do you handle food inventory? How do you automate your processes of your food banks using spreadsheets and client records, data security, all sorts of unique techniques that deal with actually feeding people that need food? So we brought all those learnings together and we launched Quad. And Quad is TechSoup's newest initiative and it's a space where you can come together with your peers and other stakeholders to work on these issues. The issues that are most important to you while saving resources and tools and training, giving you the resources and tools and training that you need to feed people. I'm gonna pass it to my colleague, Erin to talk about our new initiative, Quad. And it's a membership-based platform for nonprofits building connections, getting individualized support and accessing savings on tech products and services for your food charity so that you can help more people. And with that, I'm gonna pass it to Erin. Thanks, Susan. Hi, everybody. I have my camera off because of my connection. But anyways, I'll be moving on here. But like Susan said, when you become a member, you're joining a dedicated community space of others just like you. This is where your crew can hang out to offer you advice, share best practices and give you the encouragement needed to keep moving forward with new solutions. As a member, you also get access to templates, how-to guides and events with experts that understand the new unique challenges you're facing as a hunger-relief organization. Plus, you also get a dedicated member support in a meet to ensure you're getting the most out of your Quad membership. As a nonprofit ourselves, we're nonprofits for three decades. We've learned a thing or two about how to provide the best care for your community. And we'd love for you to experience that firsthand. As member support, I'll help guide you on getting products and advocating for you. We'll have a consultation call. But what Quad members especially appreciate are the huge savings on tech products and services in the TechSoup catalog. Plus unlimited access to your two over 170 TechSoup courses for keeping your staff and volunteers on their A-game. And all of this is for $200 a year. That's less than what most nonprofits pay for tech solutions, training and services. So let's take a closer look at those savings. So here are some of the dozens of products that you would be able to request through Quad with fees removed. This includes Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Norton Security Deluxe with Books Online, Windows Operating System Upgrade. These are just four of the products alone. And in these four, you'll save $199. So that immediately reverses you from the Quad membership payment. And with your Quad membership, you can also access TechSoup's range of services to help your food security or better implement and manage your technology. Quad members have saved $163 alone on just these three popular products below. Salesforce Management, Digital Management Assessment, Digital Marketing Consultation and Website Security and Hosting. This is just sort of a sampling of the services you would be able to access as a Quad member. And the Quad benefits and savings continue, of course, with the unlimited access to over 170 of our courses to keep you, your staff and your volunteers on their A-game. With Quad, you can save $350 alone on some of our popular courses on grant writing and management and Google Ad Grants and cybersecurity. Again, this is just a small sample of what you can get. And in addition to the savings on the popular software and services and training, you get access to this rich community space. Here's an example of a post from one of our food security organizations who's sharing a free tool like here, a free tool to help with pantry pickup and deliveries. This is just one example of a member sharing tools and best practices that can help the organization. Here's our food security library of articles and resources we're all continually adding to. Here you'll find templates for Excel, document management solutions, tools for managing volunteers and more. And then we have events with experts and other food security organizations to learn more from one another in real time, like in this case, apps for volunteer management. So you are in good company. These are some of the organizations who are part of Quad right now from food banks, food rescue organizations, senior citizen councils. All of these organizations are working hard to feed their community just like you. And they wanna share their learnings and challenges while accessing the tech savings needed to grow their impact on a shoe screen budget. We'd like to see you as part of the community as well. If you'd like to learn more info and schedule a call with me, let me know in the chat and we'll follow up with you. We'll also drop in a link where you can learn more about Quad. Thanks for listening and I hope you're excited about joining. And now it's time for a little bit more Q&A from the audience if there are any, feel free to. Are there more questions? Oh, I see more questions came in. Yep, Tanya, as a nonprofit, Tanya asks, as a nonprofit, we've been buying the food directly from our SC farmers. However, it's been difficult to raise funds. Suggestions on how we can continue to do the work. Is that for me? Direct to me? Yeah, it's SC, South Carolina, I'm assuming, but it sounds like you're working on getting more produce and having a hard time connecting with more people that have produce. This is a really detailed kind of question. Yeah, South Carolina, okay. I think that one of the things that you can try and do is definitely connect with, I would honestly have to have a personal, do you want to set up and put conversation with me because that might be a little bit more useful to help you connect with the resources that you would need to either do fundraising or to get more food for free. Tanya, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm gonna drop my email here in the chat. And for those of you who also wanted to have a demo for carrot, please feel free to reach out to me directly and also to ask me any questions. I've got about 10 years of experience in this. And there's a lot of free sources that I can refer you to and other really great nonprofit organizations or for-profit organizations that can help you as well. And I'm noticing that some people are dropping DMs to me that they're in. I preferred you write it just to everyone just because it's hard for me to manage the DMs and they will go away after we hit the recording button. If you don't mind just either say that you're in, say it out loud to the larger chat so that I don't have to transfer them over if that's okay with you and happy that people are excited and joining us. Okay, see if there's another question, I'm okay. Here we go. Regarding the social network element of Quad, this is a question for Erin. How many organizations are currently, I can actually answer this question, are currently participating in Quad? That's what Brigitte asked this question. And right now, as we mentioned, we just, this is the newest initiative of text if we just launched it a couple months ago. There's about 33 organizations currently in Quad. Erin, is that right? Yeah, roughly around that. And we've talked to a couple of organizations and the consultations, they've mentioned that there are other forums they go to related to food security, but they did notice that the uniqueness that we have and we should cultivate is the tech aspect. So while you can talk about a lot of things in there, one way we can help support of course is the conversation surrounding tech tools and how that can help you make impact with your programs. And when it comes to logistics, support, operations, strategy, everything. So that's one thing that makes us stand out since it's such a small community right now. In some ways, with the Quad membership, you can add nine additional colleagues too. Our goal, again, is to get people talking about solutions and challenges. And so we think, since it's so new, not many people in there are right now and each of you have the ability to add nine colleagues. You can create your own community there with your own narratives and topics you wanna talk about. It's at the beginning and there's potential for really building it out in a proper way to make impact. Thanks, Erin. Sure. All right, next question. The in-town collaborative said this one is for Allison. With the law mandating donations, have you seen an increase of people dumping food at nonprofits and overwhelming them? So that's a great question. This is very early in this process. So it's hard to say exactly how it will continue to shake out because the actual enforcements for this don't take effect until 2024. So right now everybody is being notified that they need to start donating food right now, but they won't be fined for it until 2024 if they're not. So I think that we're rolling out a lot of composting as well as this mandatory food donation thing. And we're educating the people at the grocery stores and the hospitals and everything about what the difference is between food that needs to be composted versus food that needs to be donated. Donation and dumping has definitely been a problem for years and years before SB 1383 and it will continue to be a problem and it just takes more education really. Non-profit organizations do have the ability to say no, even if they show up on site and see a donation and see that it's just half of it's all rotten, it's gonna get a boost. So as far as my personal experience, no, we haven't seen that yet. In fact, it's in the opposite because there has been more time and more incentive to go out and do that sort of education and teaching people about how to avoid donation and dumping. There are also really great food recovery organizations that do have the capacity sometimes to take a small percentage of contaminated food and be able to have volunteers sort that out to get the fresh produce away from the needs to be composted produced. And now that there's an infrastructure to compost it in place that there's more initiative to do that as well. Great, thank you. We're getting more questions. Okay, we have a question for Erin actually. So the question is, can you explain the tech part of Adobe? We get charged 19 per month. If we join, does this reduce this monthly cost? That's a great question. So the quad membership removes administrative fees, but that doesn't remove the discount that you may get directly at Adobe's site. So you would still pay the discounted cost per month, but we remove the administrative fee. That administrative fee is the fee to get access to the discounted rates directly at Adobe. That Adobe product is a discounted product. So you'll be paying normally a discount for the monthly subscription or service, but there are other products. There's a lot of products at TechSoup that are just strictly donated. For instance, a docusign standard is $89 admin fee. And so you don't have to go to docusign site to get a discount there, you just get it. So if we remove the admin fee of $89, that's it. And you can get your docusign subscription without having to pay anymore. So it depends on which products there are. What I think I will do for quad members is I'm gonna put together a list differentiating the donated at this offers, which ones that removed admin fees get you directly the product compared to the removed admin fees get you discounted products where you still pay. Yeah, that's something to put together and I'll get that. And if you, I don't know your name, admin computer, but if you want that, I'll find out and let you know I can send it to you directly. Maybe just DM Aaron through Zoom right now that might be the easiest or put it in chat if whatever you prefer and your email address. And I was only laughing, Aaron, just because it's so complicated. We definitely need some sort of chart because like even what you just said, like it's very complex, not a simple answer. Yeah, and since I'm so deep into it, I thought it was easy, but I can answer more questions definitely. Yeah, so we have time for a couple more questions. I'm gonna, or at least one. So David Porter is asking Allison, why is SB13 necessary from a company's perspective? Other than regulation, what incentives do companies have and what to do what 1383 requires? Have these incentives been explored? That's a great question. And then I'm gonna take it a little bit further because obviously there's the tax incentives that have been around for a while for companies to be able to donate food. But I think that one of the prohibitive things of the past has been that if a company has a established relationship with a food bank that then later reroutes donations out to individual nonprofits to pick up, there's been a lot of inconsistencies in the past of them having pickups for their regularly scheduled runs. And I think what SB1383 does is it really opens up the puts a fire under the feet of the donors to find a reliable partner and to open up that network of more and more non-profit organizations being available to not only take the food, but also have resources and funds directed directly at them from their municipalities to be more consistent with this. So it incentivizes companies to establish stronger relationships and to have these written contracts that are in place with their receiving agency partners. So it actually, it takes away the laxative method that was being used to the past. And sometimes if we have some food, we can maybe put it out there and somebody might pick it up, but we'll probably just end up putting it, throwing it away anyways. But the incentives also are not only taxed, but also there's a lot of community feeding, the feeding of a community that is near them aspects of this, where they're now, maybe they were paying attention to the pounds of food that they were donating or the types of produce or meat or dairy, which are items that are obviously necessary and hard to find in a lot of communities. But now they have more of incentive to get these items that they may be previously were throwing away, put into the donation pile and then put out into the community so that they can actually measure that impact in a more visible and transparent way. Thanks, Allison. And so with that, I'm going to wrap up. I wanted to mention that if anyone wants to talk about other food rescue, food redistribution apps, drop them in the chat just so others can know. Feel free to use the chat right now for that. And thank you to everyone for being a part of our community. We hope to see you in Quad. Again, if you're interested, just chime in, I'm in, in chat or hit reply on any of our reminder emails or email us at community at TechSoup. Email me at Susan at TechSoup. It's very easy to find us or you could just message us again, like I said in the chat. And if you know someone who you think might be interested and want to know about Quad, please tell them to reach out to us or send us their information. We know that this community from talking to those 62 organizations that I mentioned at the beginning is a very strong referral community and you all trust each other. So if you yourself don't want to join Quad for whatever reason, but you think of someone else that might benefit from it, please let us know, connect us with those people we've actually brought in. A lot of people just buy that kind of network referral. And again, a final reminder that we will be sharing the replay from today's event. Any slides and links shared in an email in the next couple of days. And thank you. Mostly, oh, there's Aaron's cat and his cat's tail, which always appears in every new video. It's really fun. Yeah, feel free to drop your links in the chat as we say goodbye. Thank you for joining us. And we'll see you again soon. We're doing these Feed More Tech Talks every other week. So thank you. Have a great weekend, everyone.