Emily & Susan – From Teacher and Student to Co-Directors

[00:00:10] Dominique: Hello. Welcome to Green Champions. 

[00:00:12] Adam: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people sharing sustainability success stories. 

[00:00:17] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Dominique.

[00:00:26] Adam: And I'm Adam.

[00:00:27] Dominique: Today we are very excited. We have two guests. So you have four voices in the podcast today. We are joined by Emily Rials and Susan Swinford. Emily and Susan are co-directors of Columbus Food Rescue where they manage over 200 weekly food pickups, and they work closely with donors and agencies to reduce food waste and fight hunger. Today we are excited to spotlight Emily and Susan together as our green champions and learn how they're transforming food rescue efforts to build a more just and sustainable food system.

Thanks for joining us. For you both, could you just give us a quick kind of background on your first exposure to sustainability and food justice, and then we'll get into kind of your individual questions.

[00:01:07] Susan: How did each of you find food rescue?

A good friend of mine, Susan Kaiser, was the director for the version of this in its previous incarnation. And when she became ill, I was helping her try to stay in that role. And I was learning a lot about it 'cause I was running around a lot.

And, then it became clear that she wasn't gonna be able to continue. And she asked me to take it on, which I did in February of 2020. 

So, shortly thereafter everything fell apart and we had to rebuild it which is how Emily came into the role because she was coming back to Columbus. And I desperately needed help because all the donors stopped having food and many more people needed food and it was chaos.

[00:01:50] Dominique: Okay. So Emily, how did you find Food Rescue? I know it sounds like Susan brought you in, but how would you tell that story?

[00:01:55] Emily: My memory is that when Susan Kaiser was sick, I was staying with Susan Swinford's mom, and there were some rescues that needed picked up in the area near where she lived. And so we would go and I would take goofy selfies of Susan's mom in front of the Ronald McDonald statue at Ronald McDonald House, holding some like big boxes, pastries.

 And then I was more aware of what you were doing with Food Rescue as things were progressing toward your taking it over and thenI came back to Columbus so that I didn't get stuck locked down in a dorm in California, because that's where I was living at the time. 

I had a teaching postdoc. And was again, staying with Susan's mom and there were a lot of things that had been working okay about Food Rescue US Columbus up until that time. But like Susan said, all the donors closed down. All the receiving agencies had either closed down or different hours or different ways of distributing food. So the need was massive, but also there was this like giant database that was no longer accurate in any way. 

And it turns out that I am more willing than I thought I was, to make lots of cold calls to random phone numbers that are listed as restaurant or food pantry contacts. 

[00:03:21] Adam: Susan, kind of, how did your background lead to this? 

[00:03:24] Susan: I had been through an illness. And it turned out to be a thing that I believed in, in the way that I believed in teaching. When you teach, you get to convince people that they can do more than they think they can and show them that they can think more than they think they can. And then it turned out that there was this other thing I could do. And particularly during COVID, it was really sanity saving to be able to get up and go do something useful. still true today, like when the world is burning, at least you can get up every morning and " Okay, there is a concrete thing I can do and I can invite other people to do it with me."

[00:03:55] Dominique: And that thing does a tangible good. There are a lot of complexities to it. We're not solving food justice and we're not solving the food system. But in the meantime, there are people who don't have food to eat and there's food going into landfills.How do you feel you bring your teaching background into this role?

[00:04:13] Susan: We both have teaching backgrounds and we've tried to be pretty thoughtful about the way we invite other people into that. We believe, for instance, that there's a reason to have volunteers do these rescues. Not just that they are getting to do something useful and seeing them, it's pretty easy to do and maybe getting a taste or a continuation of that, but also getting people to think more about how the food system is broken. Getting people to go into the spaces that they don't normally go into. There's a disparity in people who tend to have the ability to volunteer and the people who are needing that food delivered.

that's not a straight division, but a lot of times you could live in Columbus and never go certain places. But if you volunteer for Food Rescue, you will be going lots of places 'cause you're picking up at a lot of places that have, for instance, expensive eateries and then you're going to places that don't for the most part. And the most remarkable thing is that you encounter all of these people who are working with their neighbors. They're just getting on with doing what needs to be done. People with few resources helping other people with all that they've got. And that's a really interesting challenge to try and get other people to think about, if somebody with fewer resources can do so much, what can the rest of us do? What should we be doing? How do you find that balance? Because you have to have self care. And a real problem is that when you're living closer to the edge, it's hard to take care of yourself because there's so much need around you at times. So it's trying to encourage people on one end to take care of themselves and maybe encourage people on the other side to be a little more uncomfortable.

[00:05:46] Emily: She directs Food Rescue rather like she directed a classroom. If you wanna get back to the, like how is your teaching? Inflect, how you exist in Food Rescue world?

[00:05:56] Dominique: And you're qualified, having been a student of Susan's class. 

[00:06:00] Emily: Little bit. Susan is extraordinarily good at helping volunteers understand the why and understand it in a way that then raises further questions about, what else can we be doing in these spaces to make them more robust and to make ourselves more sort of intertwined in them.

[00:06:17] Dominique: Which is so important. I think we see it in all of our lives. People just who are quick to be like upset at the system or quick to complain or throw quick ideas of how to solve what's going on and a variety of areas. But I love that you're teaching them why and encourage 'em to ask questions 

[00:06:33] Emily: Well, and they're also then able to teach us, right? Like that's the other piece of it, is that she is a teacher in this space and also we are taught constantly by the people we're working with, regardless of who they are. Because lived experience is the thing. 

[00:06:47] Dominique: Yeah. Can you add some more color to that for our listeners of your relationship between the two of you from student and teacher to now being like co-directors? 

[00:06:56] Susan: Wow. We've known each other,

[00:06:59] Emily: I was 15. Known me since I was 15 years old. 

I'm 36. So a long time.

[00:07:06] Susan: So we have a fairly similar mindset in terms of why you're doing what you're doing, how to understand it, being interested in what some people would call overthinking, but they're wrong.

A lot of what I worry about is not letting my thinking calcify, not getting stuck in the, "Well, I know these things because I did this theory and I know these things and I studied this" and continuing to learn from the people around us. And I think that is one of the things that Emily is really good at, which is listening to people and taking on a lot of empathetic positions, thinking about social justice in really complex ways and thinking about how you treat other people with dignity, what it looks like, what that interaction might look like from the other side.

 I came into this knowing like, this is how you do volunteer work and this isn't, you're efficient and you do things and you don't wanna waste people's times. And there's certain kinds of things that you value in particular groups, And a school system might be that. But working in a community, you learn from others.

Sometimes what matters more is that you greet every person, talk to them, have enough time for everybody and it may take longer and people may wait longer. But that element of seeing each person matters more. 

[00:08:18] Adam: It seems like a, a huge shift going from, "Hey, what's the most efficient process?" To "How do I connect with people?" How has that changed you as a person?

[00:08:27] Susan: I think it helped me shift my priority some. I think I was so used to having a little bit of a consumer based model, like I'm asking volunteers to do something. And so because I was asking them transactionally, then I needed to repay them with this promptness of this paying attention to their time. And I kind of had to relax into the you know what, "Not everybody has to like us. Not everybody has to do this." I grew up as a person, like everybody should like me. My husband always says, "If you don't like everybody, why does everybody have to like you?" 

I thought, "oh, okay." And so it was coming around to the idea that it's you know what? I believe in what I'm doing. I know that this is what we should be doing, so I need to relax. We're not for everybody. This isn't a great volunteer opportunity for everybody. If you want everything to go perfectly smoothly with no hiccups and no having to throw a Hail Mary or just think on your feet, then it's this, isn't it 'cause somebody won't answer the phone, they will have changed their hours, the road will be closed. Like there's a million things, more food than you can get in your car. 

 This isn't for everybody, but we'll find the people for whom it's a great fit."

[00:09:33] Adam: Emily, what about you? How has that work changed you? Because it sounds like you had this rebuilding period after the pandemic and you've really gotten deeper into this work, like how's that impacted you?

[00:09:43] Emily: I'm gonna back up a little bit and say Susan was an extraordinary teacher for me in part because she was a model for me of how you could be a woman who thinks a lot and asks a lot of hard questions and has a full and engaging life. And that blew my mind when I was a teenager. And that was a lot of why I studied what I studied in college and why I thought, "Oh, okay, I guess I'll try teaching." 'Cause

[00:10:12] Dominique: What'd you study in college?

[00:10:13] Emily: English.

[00:10:14] Dominique: Okay.

[00:10:14] Emily: And she was my English teacher. And what she has kindly not mentioned, which is a thing that has changed since I was 15 years old, is that I would not say any words in the classroom. I would sit there and I would've done the reading and I would have many thoughts and I would say no words. And she kindly and unkindly would call on me. Like doggedly try to get me to say "Nope, was not going to happen. " I think I've gotten better at that, but

[00:10:41] Susan: I was able to be a little braver in studying what I wanted to study than I think I would've been otherwise. And then I figured out " Oh, actually I kind of like this teaching thing too." But both because of pandemic things and the nature of academia, that was not going to be a track that made sense for me to continue on. So lucky me, having kept up, I am the student she cannot get rid of, this opportunity comes along to try to help make sense of a really sort of gnarly tangled, apocalyptic feeling situation. And on the one hand it felt exactly like being back in the classroom and being asked to say things out loud that I didn't want to, 'cause I was making phone calls and I'm calling people who maybe donated something three or four years ago, and their number is still in the system.

[00:11:28] Emily: I don't like talking on the phone very much. And there I was making all of the calls trying to figure out, "okay, who is still open? How does this work?" And then the sort of first big thing that we took on as Food Rescue US Columbus was this USDA Food Box program that we were doing with Roshelle where there were semis of boxes showing up in these parking lots. And

[00:11:52] Susan: To be clear, we asked them to come to the parking lot. They weren't just. Fair enough. 

[00:11:56] Emily: Good. Yes. I mean, sometimes they did just show, but for a while it was like a semi full of boxes of produce and a semi full of boxes of milk, and this was stuff that needed to get out somehow. But like initially, the first couple of times we didn't think through or know how to find a forklift to get the pallets of boxes off the semis.

So we had called out these volunteers to help us move this food, and all of a sudden we were having to ask, "Hey, anybody willing to get up in the truck with a dolly and move boxes from the back of the truck to the front of the truck so we can get 'em out and then put them on the ground and then put them in cars and then send them out?"

[00:12:36] Susan: This would be overwhelming in any other circumstance, but also like we're gonna figure it out 'cause we always do and, you learn things and you learn from the people around you and

We got better.

[00:12:48] Emily: We did. You figure out how to laugh it off and we, I mean, we've still got a group of volunteers from that July 2020 start who still do regular rescues, they get giddy when they see each other or when we're all in a place together. It turns out it, it is a community that figured it out and continues to figure it out.

[00:13:11] Dominique: Susan, you shared about taking on this role after a loss in the organization. Can you share more about that experience?

[00:13:16] Susan: Yeah. Susan Kaiser was a repressible, enthusiastic, engaging, smart, funny. She was all these things. She's still kind of this angel on my shoulder. Right? And sometimes it's just like, why not do it? 'cause that's what she would say, "why not?" So in a lot of ways, this job just feels like this final gift she gave me, right? Like this, "Oh, would you do this? Would you?" And I was like, "Okay, I will." Not knowing if I would keep doing it forever, but COVID. The job got me through it and it was like, "Oh, there she is, still taking care of me, still giving me something to do."

And we had this funny moment in a meeting when we were talking to the new executive director of Local Matters and it was relevant in the moment, but also weird that Emily has just kind of looked very sincerely and said, " We have a lot of dead people."

but it was a way of conveying the fact that some of what motivates both of us is the fact that there have been very important people in our lives who were really guided by the idea like, "What can you do to help people?" One of my biggest regrets is that my dad never got to be involved with Food Rescue because he would've loved it. He would have loved seeing and doing something in all these parts of Columbus. I mean he would've been like, "I think I can drive a, a forklift. Lemme see." 

Food matters. The joke in my family is, did I make enough food? Of course you made enough food. Like we always make way too much food. 

[00:14:30] Emily: But you gotta have enough.

[00:14:31] Susan: You gotta, you gotta, have enough.

[00:14:32] Dominique: I'm an Arab family. I totally get it. 

[00:14:34] Susan: People come in, you offer them a drink, you offer them food. It's always that. So like that whole mentality is how much food matters that you communicate to people or with people with food, right? That that's how you connect, that you talk over it, that that's how you show you welcome them. It's hospitality. Food matters because it's a gift you can give to people.

And that means it matters that people have food in order to be able to show hospitality to others. And that's part of what we're doing. And so like knowing how much it matters socially, knowing how much my dad cared about those things and, and, my whole family, that's always with me. Kaiser's always with me. Just like, why not? Well, what else could we do? I'm sure we could do it. I bet we can. And that was useful, I think, for Emily as well. 

[00:15:15] Emily: Roshelle was similarly like, " Ah, we'll figure it out. Ah, let me see if I can talk to somebody." She could sweet talk any warehouse staff person. She had this way of finding a connection point with people to then draw them into the mission, which was making sure that people had food. And making sure that the food wasn't going to waste. 

[00:15:34] Susan: Roshelle was so vital to our figuring out how on earth to do this and was so gracious with our being two bumbling middle class white ladies trying to move away from a vision of non-profit charity towards something that was more like community building and solidarity.

[00:15:58] Emily: And she was so good at saying, "This is what you bring. These are the skills that you've got. This is what the situation requires, and this is what I also bring and here's how all of those things together can make magic and can make sure that people have food."

And she prioritized care for other people in a way that was intentional and also extraordinary and also devastating. And so figuring out how to do this work in her absence has been extraordinarily difficult, which is part of why I said the thing. Like it, we, there are a lot of dead people motivating what we do. We've got Kaiser, we've got Susan's dad, Roshelle is this sort of outsized beacon of, we had all of these plans, there were all of these things we were gonna do and a lot of what we're trying to do now is figure out how to do the things that we do in honor of and with respect toward the work that she cared about and wanted to do with us because it felt like such an honor that she wanted to do anything with us. 

My, my mom died a couple years ago, and so I sort of had to take a step back from doing physical food rescue stuff for a while because I was helping take care of her. 

[00:17:13] Dominique: But the last time she was in Columbus, she wanted to go do rescues with me, and so we spent a couple of hours with her riding along, doing rescues, and I, because I am this child was like, "We're not doing the easy ones. We're gonna you're gonna be pushed a little bit. And that she was excited about that was surprising, honestly, and also a huge gift.

[00:17:40] Emily: Her excitement about community had nothing to do with food generally, but it turns out she had brought her nursing students to one of the supportive housing networks that we take food to. So I said, oh, we're gonna go, we're gonna drop off this food. And she was like, "I know this place. We were here." And so there was this sort of extraordinary confluence of care. These are our dead people. They're wonderful. They keep us doing what we do.

[00:18:06] Dominique: Adam and I are not qualified to talk about grief and how you should navigate it, but I think it is a big part of all of our lives. Any listener, I'm sure can relate to some of the things that you're sharing of someone that's impacted them a lot.

So I love the way that you talk about these individuals and the way that you keep them alive all the time. 

I only can imagine how many evil stories begin with I met Susan, or I met Emily, or I watched them take a big part of this problem. And so I just think it's so amazing to hear the way that people have been a huge part of both your journeys and how you carry that with all the work that you do. I think that's truly amazing, so thank you for sharing that with us.

[00:18:40] Susan: I know in our next episode we'll unpack more about your success with Food Rescue.

 Can you give us a quick, just visual into what does Food Rescue actually look like for anybody listening who's now fallen in love with both of you and is, "Wow, I love what they're doing, but I don't really know what Food Rescue really is."The model itself is really straightforward. There's a web-based app. You sign up to be a volunteer, and then you can look at the schedule and you'll see the schedule for a day or a week. You'll see which rescues are still available. You can click on it and you get more information. Here's the time. You're gonna pick up here, you're gonna drop off here. It tells you how far it is, 4.1 miles. And so you look at it and you go, "Oh, I could do that". So you click and say, "I'll do it." And then you go do it, and then you click and say, "I did it. "

So it's basically driving to a location. The rescue's already set up, right? So it's a real direct transfer. Aside from the kitchen, all our food is going directly from donor to recipient, and the volunteers are the Uber that gets it there.

[00:19:42] Emily: So it can look like boxes of frozen food or like slightly dented cans from a hospital kitchen. It can look like a shopping bag of bagels. It can look like a giant garbage bag of bagels. It can look like boxes of assorted produce that have been pulled from a grocery store. It can look like bulk produce from a community drop off at a rec center. The app makes it possible for us to say roughly how big we anticipate each rescue is going to be. Sometimes, especially at a grocery store, someone will show up and we anticipated that it would be one SUV full, and it is in fact three SUVs full.

And so often we get a call when that happens. But we will also sometimes do rescues that are three or four pallets from a produce wholesaler. And we'll ask multiple rescuers to come and it's a little bit like a callback to the semis in a parking lot where multiple rescuers will show up. We will divvy up the food into their respective cars and they will go and take that stuff to multiple places at the same time.

[00:20:43] Adam: I love this theme that's emerging. It's like it looks different every time. so much variety in this. But the sense of like, all right, well we're gonna figure it out. We're gonna show up, we're gonna do it. And we will learn from that and we'll get better. I think that's really exciting that you've got that kind of creativity and I see that energy of, of how ideas bounce off of both of you. 

[00:21:03] Susan: Yeah. I mean, she's annoyed with me a lot the the time.

[00:21:06] Emily: But, and vice versa. Let's be clear. But if you think about like the system we're not fixing the problem of a food system that produces huge amounts of waste. We're sort of helping keep usable waste from going in the landfill, but each of these individual rescues is not in and of itself making that system categorically different from what it is.

But it is sort of drawing attention to the absurdity of how much surplus food exists and the fact that despite all of the surplus food, there are still so many people who are not eating and are not eating regularly and are not eating what they want to be eating.

And in some ways, the messiness or the weirdness or the unpredictability of the schedule sort of reinforces "That's what's needed to try to sort of fill the gaps in these dysfunctional systems that we've got."

Then how can we ask questions and agitate for actual systemic change so that we don't have systems that are producing massive amounts of waste and massive amounts of inequity at the same time.

[00:22:12] Adam: What motivates you both, when things get tough, 'cause that sounds like things get tough all the time. What keeps you going?

[00:22:18] Susan: I mean, it's gonna sound weird, but like there's an obsessive compulsive part of me that's you shouldn't waste things. People need that. I was thinking about what Emily was saying as sort of non-controversial as the whole process is, go pick up food that's gonna be thrown away. Take it to people who need that food. There's a way in which the action is provocative or empowering.

Which is to say if you go to a restaurant where someone's been working and they've been thinking, "Oh my God, we throw so much food away and I wondered what we could do with it," Then they're excited and they recognize, "Oh, there are people working on this. Oh, there are ways I can continue to take that energy or that anxiety about the wasted food and do something with it."

So people get excited. Like I still remember a caterer we went to and the first time we did a pickup like the people, it was late at night. It was like 11 o'clock. We're picking it up after an event and 

[00:23:07] Dominique: And I wish listeners could see Emily's face right now. Sorry.

[00:23:11] Susan: But there's like, the staff came out, all the caterers came out and they were like on, and they clapped us away because

[00:23:18] Emily: It was the cutest thing. 

[00:23:20] Susan: And it was like, you realize that here are all these people working in a corporate model and corporate may not be that interested in it because if you're thinking about wasting time or you're thinking about like where your priorities are, that that may not be where it is yet. But like all of these people who are making the food, it was exciting for them to know it was gonna go somewhere. And so there's that idea that you're igniting something in people by saying, "Look, you can do something, work with us, we can do this." Agitate a little bit, get corporate to pay more attention. But there's also something a little provocative about it.

We went to a big box store and at this point Emily had a long day and she knew she needed to get the food 'cause she had the van and I was putting stuff in my car to go somewhere else.

[00:23:59] Emily: And when she says the food and the van, we are talking two full pallets plus some extra boxes that had been wedged in. So the van was full.

[00:24:08] Susan: And my car was full, right? But they had brought out eggs and they were cartons of eggs that a lot of them were cracked. And so Emily's like, "We're not dealing with them." And I'm like, " Oh, maybe we are." 

[00:24:19] Emily: So I'm helping the guy get the pellets into the van and she is painstakingly removingthe full unbroken eggs. Then she takes them to the bathroom and she washes 'em off. She washes out the cart and she puts 'em in. 

[00:24:34] Susan: Because they're eggs and people need eggs.it's hard to get meat. It's hard to get eggs. They aren't the things that are donated. Time does matter sometimes ' cause she needed to get to pantries that were gonna close. And that's true. But like when I can, like I took the eggs and dropped 'em off. And we went to this place before and we cover rescues, which is to say if ideally volunteers sign up, all the rescues are signed up for, but like today, there are three unclaimed rescues.

In this particular, it was on the site. I didn't claim it. I got there, sat down, was waiting for the stuff to be brought out and I saw someone claim it.

So I decided to wait there until they came, introduced myself and have them take food one place and I could take it another, we'd split it up. But while I'm sitting there, I look at this pallet and I'm like, What about that one?" He was like, "Oh, there's a bunch of rotten fruit in there. I mean if you want to go through it." And it was peaches and they were great, but there were also some really gross peaches in there. But I went through half a pallet of boxes of peaches and separated the good from the bad 'cause I was waiting for the volunteer.

You don't always have time for it, but like sometimes like the people walking through that large warehouse, were like, "Oh, we do throw away a lot of food." So there are different ways you can get people to think about stuff just by that action. 

[00:25:46] Dominique: It's so easy to think people who are in your shoes, who see so much potential for waste, huge pallets, semi-truck, like you're seeing large, large amounts of food needing to be rescued. And I think it's easy to assume people in your shoes would be like, "Oh, the little things that I do don't matter as much because of how much is going on." And that scale would warp what it feels like to be an individual. But I love hearing that you two are also the same people that will separate out bad from good peaches or wash off an egg.

And I think just the value you genuinely put on every piece of food, knowing that's going to a different mouth and like the, the human connection you've talked about and from the volunteers to your own personal connection to the impact.

I'm just so grateful for the work that you both do. I know Adam also is, thank you for telling your story and for sharing it with us. 

how can listeners connect with you and support the work that you're both doing?

[00:26:41] Emily: So, Columbus Food Rescue is a program of Local Matters. We are findable on the internet through the Local Matters website. If you search Columbus Food Rescue, we'll come up. So Instagram is @cbusfoodrescue. Facebook is @ Columbus Food Rescue. Said all the way out. The Local Matters website is www.local-matters.org.

And there's a tab on that website that will take you specifically to Columbus Food Rescue. Though you should also check out all the cool things that Local Matters is doing around food access and education, aside from what we do. 

[00:27:15] Adam: Fantastic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. And if you're listening, do check out the show notes to find all those resources. As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:27:32] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us in your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website, thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll be digging into the second half of Emily and Susan success story in our next episode.