Hope Is A Verb - Aidan Reilly - How just one truck can change the world

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Meet Aidan Reilly, one of the cofounders of the Farmlink Project. In 2020, Aidan and his friends rented a U-haul with an idea to help their local food bank. Today, their 'one truck' mission has flourished into a movement, spanning the North American continent and delivering recovered food to people in need. FIND OUT MORE ABOUT FARMLINK: Website: https://www.farmlinkproject.org/ Movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZYkyNHFb3I This episode of Hope Is A Verb was hosted by Angus Hervey, cofounder of Future Crunch and Amy Davoren-Rose, creative director. The soundtrack for this podcast is "Rain" composed and performed by ⁠⁠El Rey Miel ⁠⁠from their upcoming album "Sea the Sky." Audio Sweetening by Anthony Badolato- ⁠⁠Ai3 Audio and Voice⁠⁠. You can contact us at: [e-mail]

Welcome to Season 2 of Hope is a Verb, a podcast that explores what it takes to change the world through conversations with the people that are making it happen. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are the unknown heroes who are mending our planet, stitching together a better future, and showing us the best of what it means to be human. showing us the best of what it means to be human. Climate change and food waste and agriculture and hunger, those are issues that they're so massive, you can barely wrap your head around it.

It's like trying to think of the scale of the universe. It's like, I can barely imagine it. How am I ever going to do anything about it? And now that we found ourselves in this position, we're actually moving the needle and getting hundreds of millions of pounds of food back into the charitable food system and into the hands of families for free. It has allowed me to realize that taking a step in the right direction and that sort of one-truck method, that will add up over time

to where you actually are poking and in New York when the pandemic hits, and suddenly you're back at home wondering how to fill the time between Zooms. Well, if you're Aidan Riley and his friends, you decide to tackle a problem that's about as big as it gets, national food insecurity and an escalating hunger crisis. escalating hunger crisis. Since 2020, their non-profit, the FarmLink Project, has connected farmers to food banks, rescuing almost 100 million kilograms of fresh produce that would otherwise have gone to waste and distributed it to people in need. What started as a pandemic project has blossomed into a North American movement, bringing together young volunteers across the continent

and empowering a new generation of changemakers. If you're feeling weighed down by the state of the world right now, this story of Aidan and his friends will reassure you that our future is in very good hands. We are so pleased to be kicking off our new season with this conversation. Aidan, welcome to Hope is a Verb. Thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. We wanted to kick off with a question that we always ask our guests, which is, is there a story anywhere in the world right now that's given you hope? always ask our guests, which is, is there a story anywhere in the world right now that's giving you hope? It's a great question. I actually, just before this podcast, reached out to someone who I saw on your most recent podcast, Felix, what he's doing in Africa, helping dose nutrients into products. And what inspired me about his story was how he integrated with what already existed. And with my own organization, when we start thinking about how we can potentially go outside of the United States

and work in other countries, we have to work on that same model. And I remember how deeply his project impacted me because of how he paid so much respect to what existed in those countries. So it's a timely question because I just reached out on LinkedIn to reconnect and let him know how much that impacted me. Yeah, I think what we love so much about that story was it kind of had this really great combination of the lone individual battling against all odds, but at the same time, he was plugging into systems and communities

of thousands of people and huge existing networks. Yeah, absolutely. So we're really, really pleased to have you here and to find out a bit more about your story. And to do that, I want to ask if you could take us back to the spring of 2020. You were a university student in New York when the pandemic hit. Of all the things you could have done with that time, what made you and your friends decide to tackle food scarcity? You know, at the time I was a junior in college, I thought I was going to be a documentary filmmaker. That's what I had planned on doing once I graduated. And I had worked on a

small handful of very small projects with one of my best friends since childhood, James, as well as another friend, Owen Dubeck. And when we got sent home from school, we had nothing to do. Of course, all the plans were canceled. We started looking for stories around where we lived. I mean, we recognized that this is probably one of the greatest crises we may ever live through in our lives. And we were so used to scouring the internet and talking to people looking for inspiring stories or stories of crises thousands of miles away. But now this was happening right in our neighborhood, right in our backyards. So that's a very long-winded way of saying we were directionalists, but we wanted to do something.

And in looking around and talking to people, one of the first places we went was a local food bank that James and I had grown up volunteering at. And we learned to no surprise that they had gone from about 300 families a week to about a thousand families no surprise that they had gone from about 300 families a week to about a thousand families a week that they had to serve. It's just a matter of weeks as job insecurity spiked. And in many cases that was shocking, but it became more shocking once we recognized that from just a New York Times article that we stumbled upon, that farmers here in the U.S. at least were being forced to dump out millions and millions of pounds of food, gallons of milk just being dumped off the side of the road, or hundreds of thousands

of eggs just getting smashed. And so the initial impetus was wanting to tell a story of impact and then discovering these two ginormous issues that had so rapidly developed at the beginning of the pandemic that felt like they could solve one another. Aidan, there's just so much here to unpack. But before we do, I'd like to get a bit of a snapshot of who you are. Where did you grow up? And were there any moments in your childhood that maybe planted the seed for this to happen?

I grew up in Santa Monica. I attended an all-boys Catholic high school, Jesuit high school to be specific. I played sports. I tried to use those sports to get into university and went on to a university that I felt would make my parents proud and ultimately and thankfully ended up loving very much. But what I have to credit, and I only recognize this once over the past couple of years while I've worked on FarmLink, is that the bubble that I grew up in, whether it was that Jesuit high school or whether it was my parents or whether it was a combination of all of those factors, it was one that valued using what you have to give back to others who do not have. And that

seems like a very basic concept, but it's remarkable how many times over the past couple of years, I have spoken to people who the idea of spending your time on a mission or a project that gives back to others is completely foreign and completely alien. It's not a knock on anyone who has expressed that to me. It's more just a recognition that,

man, I grew up in an environment surrounded by other influences that allowed me to think it's not just interesting and impactful, but it's also just really cool to be able to use some skillset that you have or some resources that you have to figure out how to make something better for another. I've never been able to quite pinpoint what that might be,

but that's because I think it is a combination of my parents, my friends and their families around them and the schools that I went to, all of which had that unique common characteristic of rewarding those who put in time and energy or sacrifice a little bit to help others. I hope that doesn't sound corny because it's really true. I don't think it sounds corny. sound corny because it's really true. I don't think it sounds corny. I was going to say that is such a good observation. And it was a common belief or a common mindset between you and your friends to decide to do this because you guys were in your early 20s when you started FarmLink. Did any of you have any experience in running a nonprofit or food management? Or was anybody doing a degree in any of this?

No, not at all. We had experience in none of it. I mean, I grew up in Santa Monica. No, probably not within 500 miles of a commercial farm. And although we did grow up volunteering at food banks, and in some cases volunteering at food banks and in some cases I work working at food banks and spending some significant amount of time around providing food to others, no meaningful impact in terms of how to run one. So it was very,

very much starting from ground zero. And hence you can see that if you ever look back at photos of early, you know, our early food deliveries where we're literally driving U-Hauls with like a bed sheet taped on there. That all looks very cute and fun in retrospect, but that was like a full expression of how little we knew what we were doing. There's a great saying, which I came across recently, which says that your success is directly proportional to the amount of times that you say, screw it, I'll just figure it out. Yeah. Well, what we acknowledge is, okay, there's likely a sub 1% chance that we can figure out how to create a nonprofit out of this from where we're standing right now in our parents' living rooms as juniors in college with zero experience in any of this. But we can figure out, likely,

with our combined brain power, how to get just one truck from one farm and get that to one food bank. We said, if we can dedicate all of our attention towards that and put blinders on for all the other red tape and the things that involve starting a company, then we could probably figure that out. And once we do that, we can probably get the next. That naivete that we had in the beginning, it allowed us to number one, have the humility to go and just endlessly ask people questions and not be afraid to pick up the phone and call people and try to learn. It also gave us the self-control to put some blinders on and be hyper-focused on just five feet in front of us. Because otherwise, we would have drowned 100%. So we still refer to it internally as the one

truck mindset. If you've got a goal a million feet up in the air, then just focus on what's five feet in front of you before you let yourself get overwhelmed. Yeah, great. The one truck concept. Can you tell us the story of the first farmer that got on board? The first farmer came after several hundred farmers that hung up on us. Rightfully so. I mean, if you can imagine this was, you know, the food system was breaking down alongside the rest of society at that point in April of 2020. And farmers who already are some of the hardest working people in the world who are working for some of the slimmest margins, we're seeing a collapse of their infrastructure. Some of them are not even sure if they're going to be able to stay open throughout the next couple of months. And suddenly they're getting a call from a 21-year-old who's from Los Angeles saying, hey, we want to help you move food off of

your farm. So a lot of times we got hung up on, a lot of times people didn't understand what we were trying to do. But that first farmer, his name is Shea Myers, and we've really found him and connected with him through two ways. The first was he was mentioned in that original New York Times article we read that was talking about this issue in the first place. And I think we initially forgot about him until maybe a little bit further down the line. He actually was posting on TikTok and had amassed a following of maybe 100,000 followers on TikTok, where he was just out there in the fields, turning his phone camera around, showing pits of millions of pounds of onions that he had tractors just tilling back into the fields.

Lo and behold, once we got on the phone with him, he just said, yep, I've got them. Come get them. So once we realized that we're like, oh shoot, we need a truck. Uh, and you know, simplicity, we were so used to getting hung up on that. And he was like, yep, I've got 2 million pounds. Come get them. And there we became acutely aware of how quick, how quickly, if this thing is going to work, how quickly we need to turn around and get a 50 foot truck to get up there to the farm in Oregon and back down to California. So did you guys actually drive the truck? In many instances, we did drive the truck in the beginning. So in a case like Shea,

in that very, very first one, he was all the way up in Oregon. We had to call up a trucking service, which I didn't even know existed. I remember thinking, wow, this is like an Uber for trucks, where you can just put down a deposit and send a 50-foot truck up to Oregon and back to the location you want to send it to. But for the farms that we eventually did start connecting with, because suddenly we started to build a track record that were in and around Los Angeles, did start connecting with because suddenly we started to build a track record that were in and around Los Angeles. We didn't have the budget to always, you know, spend $1,000 on a truck. At this point, we had zero budget. So we would just go rent the U-Haul and drive it ourselves out to that food bank or out to that farm or distribution site, fill it up with like 10,000 eggs, drive back on the 405 freeway with them bouncing in the back. I mean, driving a truck for the first time is one thing.

Driving a truck loaded with eggs, that like takes it up to a whole new level. It was not without mistakes. We lost a couple axles. We bumped a couple fenders. Another time we loaded in 40,000 pounds of potatoes the wrong way into the back of a truck. So when we were there to come and unload them,

we realized we couldn't get the machinery under and we were stuck having to basically unload 40,000 pounds of potatoes by hand. Aiden, can you paint us a picture of those early days? How many of you were involved at this point? Where were you? How were you making it all work? That's one of the most amazing things about that period of time was that there was such a widespread feeling of I want to give back and I have extra time to do so. I think that is something we have to recognize as a privilege at that time. I mean, you wouldn't have time to work on something like this if you had a family relying on you or if you had to still be working in an essential job, for example.

But there were other friends initially from our colleges or wherever else who saw what we were doing once we posted on Instagram and reached out immediately and said, I want to help. And we just started taking on friends and then friends of friends. And we didn't know how to set up an org structure. So we just split it into basically three teams that we called the food bank team, the farms team, and then the trucking team. We called them deal team six. And before we knew it,

it was pretty much like a big group chat essentially of about 50 to 60, 21 or 22 year olds who are calling farmers, calling food banks and booking trucks to go from here to there. Everyone operating out of their homes. Honestly, the first 5 million pounds of food were moved before pretty much any of us had met each other in person. And that's how it was for the first year. Yeah. Wow. Can you tell us some stories of the impact? What has FarmLink done? What has it achieved? And bring us up to speed to where things are at now. Today, we've moved over 150 million pounds of food. We think by the end of

the year, it's going to be closer to 200 million pounds. That's where our mission stands today. We've done it in 49 states. We work with farms in Mexico and work with some food banks in Canada. So we're kind of across the continent. Food insecurity, it's at a higher rate now than it was in the pandemic. It has continued to rise. There are incredible regional hubs that do a fantastic job of servicing their city or their town, or in many cases, their region. But what there is not in the charitable food system, at least here in the United States, is there's not an organization that helps distribute all of the food that's available and make sure everybody can get a

piece. We're seeing tens of billions of pounds of food go to waste in these remarkable instances where it could be nothing. And then the next day, like 20 million pounds of avocados that are going to get dumped into the Atlantic Ocean or apples going to get thrown away. Stuff that people need and stuff that's expensive and difficult to get. So we recognize our value add can be one of the first organizations that can take on that amount on a 24 to 48 hour notice and then distribute it to the communities that otherwise would have a very difficult time getting it. And putting that collaboration first

rather than trying to compete for resources. It's not just people not getting the right amount of food, but it's people not getting the right kinds of food. We don't just look at this from scale, but we look at this from the impact it has by not just getting any calories into the charitable food system, but sending people home with bags of the right kind of food, of fresh fruits and vegetables, the stuff that's really luxury items in an economic strain like this. So on your website, you have that your mission is to put yourselves out of business. I was wondering if you can speak to that and what does that day look like for you? I always laugh when that gets brought up because we put that on billboards all around the US and it was

a big point of contention internally, whether it was like the best ad ever or the worst ad ever. But the idea it's getting at is that FarmLink exists to be this catch-all for instances where there's massive, massive amounts of surplus food and to provide that to the 40 million Americans and ideally all those around the world who are suffering from food insecurity. And that's great and all, but if FarmLink's having massive success in terms of food we're moving 10 or 20 years from now,

that doesn't show, it might show success for FarmLink, it doesn't show success for the problems we're trying to solve. We're working towards a future where we can provide enough space and enough resources to alleviate the pressure to allow the system to correct itself such that we're not seeing 100 billion pounds of food go to waste. We're not seeing one in every eight people walking around on the street suffering from food insecurity. That's what we mean by it.

It's interesting to work in a company whose mission is dependent on something that you want to see go away. And so that's how we're trying to put ourselves out of business. What's incredible about this story is not only did Aidan and his friends understand the issues surrounding food waste and food insecurity, but that they could see how these two big problems could help solve one another. Yeah, it's such a great solution and it's something that we've been hearing about for years, which is that we don't have a food scarcity problem,

we have a food distribution problem. The reason I think that FarmLink is such an inspiring project is that they actually decided to do something about it and they brought hundreds of other young people along for the ride. It's obviously much more than just a non-profit. It's kind of a movement. I mean, you described how you had hundreds of people on group chats and I'm sure that it's evolved since then.

Could you talk a little bit about that wider community and volunteer side of it? And also, was there a tipping point between FarmLink being a pandemic project and into what it's become now? Yeah, I think we had to make the decision once we graduated college to be like, great, successful pandemic project, or to recognize the potential of this. We chose the latter to continue and try to grow this organization

with salaried employees and people with experience, which at a certain point became a necessary decision. And as you can imagine, it threatened the value of the impact that volunteers were going to have. Because let's say our food program was operated by 50 college students who are working all together to contact farmers and contact food banks and make it happen.

And we get on someone like the head of our food program now, Luis, who's been doing this for 30 years, and he's got all the contacts in the book and on his own can move the equivalent or greater amount than that team of 50 students were doing before. However, such a unique part of this project that we recognize over a period of time is the fact that we bring young people into this space and is the fact that we can get that college age student who was going to work in this industry or that industry to start thinking about the food system as something that they could apply their smarts and their energy towards. The most rewarding thing and probably our greatest impact are those who came in thinking they wanted to do one thing, thinking this would be a two-month stint they'll do with FarmLink,

stayed for six months or a year or a year and a half, and then got a job in the food space, making a difference and change for good. That's been the case with literally 200, 250 alumni of this program. And we're like, that's an immeasurable impact. It's something we can't take lightly. So we had to get extremely intentional because if we keep hiring those with experience and expertise, then we're going to, if we're not intentional, we're going to minimize the ability for any given college student to come in and actually feel what they're capable of when they put their time to make an impact. Our answer to that was the two fellowships we launched. The first one is called the Field

Fellowship, which just goes during the whole school year and is day-to-day working alongside a full-time team member doing what they do. The second one is called the Field Fellowship, where we take a small group of students and we actually send them to partner locations to go learn as part of the program and shadow that commercial farmer or that food banker and then come back to FarmLink and help implement those into what we're doing in our solution. So the tipping point was once we started hiring people, how we immediately saw that starting to minimize probably the biggest impact of this organization, which is showing college age students and young people they can have an impact in this space and how much of an opportunity that impact has to change the food system. Or else we would just be an organization of some aging former college

students talking about the power of young people. Just in hearing you speak about it and talking about the community and being part of the team, what does it feel like to be part of this small group of people that is doing something like this? To be honest, it's easy. I get to talk on podcasts and sometimes go on stage or get to talk to groups of people about this just because I drove the U-Haul. What's hard to do is to switch careers,

to join a group of people that you've never met before in an industry that you didn't think you were interested in before. And then to commit so much of your time and energy to that, that you actually switch careers and give 100% of your time towards this impact. And that's kind of the people that I'm surrounded with now and every day. That in and of itself is incredibly humbling because it's people who give and trust and commit to a mission to the fullest capacity. And it took me much longer than it took so many of my teammates to learn how to do the same. Driving a U-Haul full of eggs bouncing around in the back did not teach me that, but getting to work with the people who joined and followed after that initial action

has taught me that. How has this project changed the way you look at the world? When you look at something like agriculture, or even when you look at something like climate change, which is what we have really started to talk about because of the fact that if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions behind the US and China. Climate change and food waste and

agriculture and hunger, those are issues that they're so massive, you can barely wrap your head around it. It's like trying to think of the scale of the universe. It's like, I can barely imagine it. How am I ever going to do anything about it? And now that we found ourselves in this position, we're actually moving the needle and getting hundreds of millions of pounds of food back into the charitable food system and into the hands of families for free, it has allowed me to realize that taking a step in the right direction and that sort of one truck method, and then surrounding yourself and having a mission and a sense of genuine curiosity how to continue that story, that will add up over time to where you actually are poking and seeing something come out the other side. You actually are making an effect on something that is so, so big.

So for anything else that I go on to work on in the future, whatever that might be, there's nothing too big. I mean, I've already started with some of the biggest things on the planet and there is so much value into breaking it down into what you can affect and then multiplying that over and over and over again. Now, I read somewhere that you guys believe that within your lifetime, there is going to be a day where every person in America has access to the food they need. Can you speak to this?

It's a ballsy statement. And here in the United States and in North America, there's a core belief that we can drastically, drastically reduce the number and availability of people who right now having to drive an hour and spend half their paycheck on gas and the right kinds of food. If you ask me, do I think that we can solve world hunger through just redistributing all that we grow? I think it's much more nuanced than that, especially as you start dealing with places outside of the United States. But what it is, is it's recognizing that we have the capability for the first time in human history to grow enough food to feed everybody on the planet twice over. And there is a long, long way to go on that distribution front. There are a lot of problems that people have been ignoring or just others have not had enough time to address that could put good, healthy, nutritious food into the hands of hundreds of millions of more people. If people want to find out more about FarmLink and support

you, where's the best place to go? Best place to go is our website, which is farmlink.org or farmlinkproject.org either. Also, you can go on to our YouTube channel. It's pretty new, but on there we've got this short documentary it's 22 minutes long it's called abundance and you should go take a look that's got our whole story and everything you need to know yeah great and in in and around a lot of this how important is the role of kind of technology social networks social media being in getting farming up and off the ground and its continued success uh yeah massively important everything from finding the initial farmer, Shay, on TikTok to connecting to get more teammates and using literally like iMessage

group chat to make this thing work. We've been a virtual organization since our start. And for that reason, everything has relied upon both digital messaging and digital marketing. And we would be nowhere without it. If you could go back to that spring of 2020 and give yourself some advice, and this is for other people who are listening to this and maybe are starting to feel that niggle that there's a problem they can solve, what advice would you give them? The first and foremost is recognize

what you can affect in the most immediate and then do that because you can spend two months or two years sitting and planning out and sketching out the perfect model of how you're going to do it, but inevitably might just launch it and then see it fail. And then through that failure, you're going to learn the most. It's that idea of failure being how you can really quickly learn and then innovate upon. Number two, anything you can do on your own, you can do tenfold if you've got a partner or two partners who you trust.

Speaking as someone who in the first couple weeks amassed 65 partners, get people who believe in you and want to support you and don't take that lightly, invite them in. Lastly, I would say have self-control with saying no as best you can. We pride ourselves on being innovative and taking risks and doing big things, but the areas where we've really gotten ourselves in trouble has been

where we haven't been able to get our head out of the water and have this sunken cost fallacy that we've tried so hard on this so many times that we must keep working on it. And eventually, once you've hit your head in the wall a billion times over, you decide to just pick up and go a different direction and it just goes so much more smoothly. So don't have that sunken cost fallacy just because you have been trying something or just because it feels so good to you. If it's not working, try to pivot.

You'll at least be able to see the answer of why the other one wasn't much more easily. Basically, start small, get great teammates who believe in you and have self-control and the ability to stand up, walk away and try a different route. Aidan, this has been such an incredible conversation. And we have one final question. What does the word hope mean to you? The word hope at this point is so much more infused with action and optimism. I used to think hope as just optimism and, you know, I can sit and I can hope for this or I can hope for that.

Now what I've realized over the past couple of years in my very short career is that hope is really manifestation. And when you hope, you're putting that into a priority of your mind and you'll see your own actions follow and you'll see the world respond to that. And I believe in that very deeply. I'm not even sure if it's a spiritual thought or not, but that's been a beautiful thing to witness thus far in my own life. And I would recommend it to anyone else who hasn't quite learned the definition of hope for themselves. We think you'll agree that this is an incredibly powerful way to look at the world and perhaps best summed up by Farmlink's philosophy of the one truck mindset. Just one truck, one delivery, one farmer, one small piece of the

puzzle at a time. That's what it takes, apparently, to change the world. Considering how far this group of amazing young people has come in such a short time, we can't wait to see where they go next. If you want to learn more about the Farmlink project and how you can support them, check out our show notes for more details. We'd like to thank our paying subscribers for making conversations like this possible. If you'd like to find out more about supporting us by becoming a paid subscriber, check out futurecrunch.com. This podcast is recorded in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. There are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. If you enjoyed this episode and you would like to support Hope as a Verb, please subscribe

and leave a review. And if you want to reach out directly, email us at hope at futurecrunch.com.au. Thanks for listening.