An Interview with Ben Simon
Special Initiatives Director at the Campus Network, Joe Mcmanus will be hosting several interviews with accomplished Roosevelt alumni over the next few weeks. As part of the Rethinking Communities initiative, these conversations will focus on how young people leveraged their own ideas and leadership to make progressive changes in their communities. These interviews should provide context and insight into several models of high-impact, local civic engagement, as well as a better awareness of our accomplished alumni network.
First up: Ben Simon, the founder and executive director of the Food Recovery Network. Ben was a member of the Roosevelt Campus Network while he at the University of Maryland, College Park. Through the 10 Ideas Process, Ben was able to explore some of the policy dimensions to food recovery. In the three years since it was founded, the Food Recovery Network has exploded across the country, gaining chapters at over a hundred colleges and donating over 400,000 pounds of food. He’s been profiled on numerous media outlets including Upworthy and MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/meet-ben-simon-recovering-unsold-food-th).
JM: Walk me through how the Food Recover Network works and how it got started.
BS: So the FRN takes food from college campus dining halls that otherwise would be wasted and donates it to hungry Americans. We started three years ago at University of Maryland College Park when we noticed that our campus dining hall was wasting a lot of good food. We approached our dining services, and set up a meeting, and asked them if three was something more sensible we could do. We set up the program, and right off the bat, we were donating 150lbs + of food per night.
[We] expanded it from there, and started calling other friends at other campuses, and started asking them… So we called friends, and started to grow the movement, and three years later, we're at 100 colleges and have donated over 460,000 pounds of food. So, long answer, but...
JM: I didn't know that FRN had expanded so much! What was the story about that how did the growth happen?
BS: For the first 10-15 chapters, it was totally word of mouth. Calling friends at other schools, being really excited that it was that easy to donate so many thousands of lbs of food from colleges, and just the sheer excitement, the calling, Facebook messaging, getting the word out.
Then, after that, we started getting media coverage. MSNBC started covering us and that raised a bunch of new chapter applications, and a few weeks later they had such a great reaction they invited us to go back on the show three weeks later in person, on MSNBC, and it just sort of scaled up from there. We won a [VH1] Do Something Award and got picked up by Upworthy, and a lot of the new, more recent applications came from media coverage.
JM: What role did [the Roosevelt Campus Network] play in the starting the FRN?
BS: I remember writing a policy proposal for Food Recovery Network when I was on campus…In terms of policy and stuff and thinking through those dimensions, some of the early conversations and resources from Roosevelt helped us think through those dimensions. And we wrote a policy proposal for a 10 Ideas booklet. Also [Roosevelt] opened up an opportunity for us to speak at a conference, which helped us get more exposure to Roosevelt chapters. JM: What were [your] early meetings with administrators were like.
BS: There was some initial resistance. They had concerns over liability, [that] if something went wrong with the food they could they be exposing themselves to a risk of a lawsuit. They also had questions about weather or not they generated enough food to donate. At the beginning they thought they didn’t…But with enough persistence they agreed to try the program out. At first we started with one night a week, but as the program started to donate food, they allowed us to do it more then one night a week. And then we started bringing on other student groups, and they really started to take ownership of it.
I would say if I was to give advice to other students doing this, and I do frequently, with our chapters and other programs trying to work with administrators on college campuses, I'd say that its hard to overestimate how important it is to have a good relationship with the administration. And that's really hard to do if you go about the route of demonizing them. It's tempting at times, when it feels like they are just kind of brushing you off and they aren't coming to the table in good faith, but for students you need to strike a delicate balance between, you know, asserting the authority that comes with being a stakeholder that pays tuition and has some power of dining, and also being a student and a partner. JM: What advice do you have for people who are just beginning to reach out to administrators? It can be very daunting for people getting over that very first hurdle! What’s some advice for getting that first meeting?
BS: For one, don't get discouraged. It can be discouraging to approach them about a new idea or initiative, and have them express concerns and raise questions about it, but that's really just an opportunity to give them more information about it. It doesn't always happen right off the bat, and it can take a lot of meetings, but if you don't give up and you carry yourself professionally, and are respectful and make your asks very clear to them, they are likely to go with what you are proposing.
