It didn’t start with a pitch deck or a business plan. In 2009 while walking in his San Fernando neighborhood, Rick Nahmias noticed citrus trees bursting with fruit that would mostly end up in the trash. Food lines were growing as the Great Recession ravaged people’s lives and livelihoods. The light bulb went on. The following three weekends, he and a few volunteers harvested over 800 lbs of oranges and tangerines from a friend’s yard and took them to a local food pantry. The pantry wanted more. And the volunteers wanted more — more of the joy they felt from helping others, being out in nature completing the cycle of its bounty, and bonding with each other. Fruit therapy.
The Backyard Harvest Program was soon in full bloom with plentiful volunteer fruitanthropists collecting over 100,000 pounds of fresh fruit from homes, farms, and public spaces in the first year. Food Forward was established as a nonprofit led by Rick, and in 2012, they branched out with the Farmers Market Recovery Program, rescuing and distributing the excess produce left over at the end of the day. The Wholesale Produce Recovery Program sprouted in 2014, piloted at the LA wholesale produce market, the largest in the country, dramatically increasing the amount of fruit and vegetables rescued and donated.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, food insecurity doubled in the LA area. Donors stepped up, and Food Forward quickly and cleverly figured out a way to scale — retooling programs, logistics, and workflows — to rescue and deliver 62 million pounds of healthy fresh food, more than double their 2019 volume.
By the end of 2021, Food Forward, powered by 40 dedicated team members, a committed BOD, 1,200+ loyal donors, and over 10,000 volunteers since 2009, distributed an average of 250,000 pounds of 200 varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables daily to nearly 350 agencies throughout California, six neighboring states, and tribal lands — enough for the recommended five servings each day for 150,000 people. Since that first backyard harvest more than 250 million pounds of produce has been rescued and donated.
As Rick explains, “We’ve never just been a hunger relief organization, we are about food access, care for the planet, building healthier communities, and inspiring others.” The EPA has given Food Forward more awards than any other nonprofit in the country for reducing food waste and its CO2 emissions.
How values built this
While Food Forward might have begun in 2009, the seeds were planted within Rick decades earlier and watered and fertilized by a strongly held and lived set of values.
An LA native, filmmaker, award-winning documentary photographer, writer, and trained cook, Rick was aware of and uncomfortable with his privilege from an early age. He questioned authority — not to make trouble — but to ask why something was the way it was, and to do something about it. This with his curiosity and creative side, including his keen sense of beauty and aesthetics expressed in his photography, led him to film school at NYU. This time in his life proved fruitful in many ways.
The direct link to Food Forward began with his exposure at NYU to Edward R. Murrow’s 1960 “Harvest of Shame,” which showcased the indignity of the treatment of farm workers, and the injustice that the people who were feeding us couldn’t afford the food. Those people stayed with him so much so that he honored the lives of those feeding the country in his 2008 photo documentary book, The Migrant Project: Contemporary California Farm Workers.
Rick's ah-ha moment came from his awareness of the lives behind our food, food injustice, and knowledge of the shocking amount of food waste in our restaurant and food distribution systems from his immersion in the gourmet cooking world. Everything clicked that day when he was walking among the abundance of citrus fruit in his neighborhood. “I’d never had an idea that felt so right and so easy and helped so many people. I could explain it to a five year old, and the universe provided.”
The scale of Food Forward’s operations requires sophisticated systems, logistics expertise, warehouse and refrigeration space, vehicles, and agile cooperation and coordination of volunteers, agencies, and so much more. When building a force for good like Food Forward, clear values act like honey to bees for like-souled donors, staff, BOD members, volunteers, and countless others who magically make this happen.
Heartburn and indigestion — how values sustain
The pandemic was a double whammy for Food Forward: the disruption of the stay-at-home orders on workflows and personal lives that all organizations and people were experiencing, plus the strain to more than double its volume to get food to people who desperately needed it. As the organization was absorbing this, the horrific racial violence and injustice of 2020 brought additional tension and upset. Turmoil and turnover ensued. The culture wilted. Food Forward and Rick were tested and exhausted.
The collective passionate commitment to two fundamental values underscored by the pandemic — food justice and community — provided the energy, focus, and teamwork needed to not only step up, but to more than meet the moment. While important and hard things are still to be completely reckoned with, just a few comments from employees on a recent Business of Giving podcast show that the solid core of Food Forward is felt:
“ . . . we rescue fruit and get it to people without any questions. It’s just giving and giving and it has filled a need in me I didn’t even really know I had.”
“. . . There is an equitable way of working. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing in the organization.“
“. . . Food Forward I’ve come to know as a family . . . There are no egos. Everybody is just here to further the cause.”
From my first interaction with Rick and others at Food Forward, I was inspired by the story. A story of good in the world that sprouted from a pure, simple, natural idea that helps so many people and unites a deep, passionate community. A story of core values powering Rick’s wayfinding journey — and quite literally stumbling, after two decades of work, upon the intersection of one’s soul with one’s work. Pure magic.
Sunday Morning: 170