Current Projects and Past Work

(Ongoing) Project Description and Objectives: 

The food recovery system is reliant on a network of volunteers who recover, repackage, and distribute excess food. This project will study the role of volunteers in food recovery operations in urban environments in the United States to assess three focus areas: 

• Understand personal drivers/motivators and costs incurred as volunteers 
• Evaluate transportation emissions related to food recovery operations, and 
• Assess the value of volunteer labor in how it impacts food recovery operations

As a Research Scientist for Morgan State University, I am the Project Manager for this project. Some of our accomplishments and ongoing work below:

• Collaborated with network partners to design an asset-based approach to our study design (complete)
• Conducted regular outreach, drafted research collaboration agreements, meeting planning logistics , agenda organizing and notetaking for meetings with two partner organizations
• Designed team workspace to include meeting documentation, action tracking, and templates
• Assisted in policy review(complete) and analysis, citation management, survey and interview design(complete) and literature review (drafted)
• Conducted online survey with food recovery volunteers from partner organizations (April-May)
• Blog post link - here

June - August

• Interviews of food recovery leadership staff
• Analyzing survey data
• Writing paper(s) and seeking publications for submittal

This project is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2115405.

For the 2024 Food Rescue US- DC Fundraiser I spearheaded the effort to meet Washington, DC DPW Zero Waste guidelines for our event. As a site, Food Rescue US-DC already contributes to the city's Zero Waste goals in our daily work and we want to ensure we do so at the event. We purchased or received donations of compliant serving ware, signage for waste stations (trash/recycling/ compost) and provided to-go containers guests used to take food home. 

I organized a small team and we provided waste stations with multiple bins (trash/recycling/ compost) for the event and we monitored them throughout the night.  We also provided to-go containers guests used to take food home. 

It was our first year providing compost bins for food scraps but, I'm proud that attendees participated and we were able to divert much of compost and recycling from the landfill~ approximately

• 37.6 pounds= Compost (food scraps, compostable plates, boats, utensils and the select compostable cups) 
• 51.3 pounds= Recycling (clean aluminum trays, boxes, wine bottles, plastic bottles, cans) 

Having worked with a lot of formal events and event planning, it's tricky to make "trash" look good and offer different options for waste at an affordable price point and time frame for small organizations. I came away from the event with a lot more information on Zero Waste event planning, and thoughts on logistics of managing organics (food waste) for big events.

Image credit- Zero Waste team member- Elana Goldstein

Resources on Zero Waste and Recycling Organics

DC Zero Waste for Food Scraps

EPA Wasted Food Scale