Stella Delp’s first role at The Farmlink Project was the “lettuce lady,” calling farms to inquire about surplus greens.
After being sent home from her sophomore spring at Stanford because of the COVID-19 pandemic to complete the rest of the year’s classes over Zoom, Stella wanted to help the communities around her. When friends Aidan Reilly and James Kanoff came together to found The Farmlink Project, she was immediately on board.
“Two big things that stood out to us were this huge amount of surplus on farms being magnified by the media due to the shutdowns and at the same time a new cohort of individuals and families facing food insecurity during a pandemic. There was this jarring amount of food going to waste and families just scraping by to feed themselves,” said Stella. The team started off small, calling farmers to see if they had surplus produce and arranging transportation for food bank deliveries.
As the organization grew and took on new members, Stella transitioned away from lettuce, working as Head of People Operations. Today, she is taking a gap year from Stanford to serve as the Chief of Staff, in charge of managing the 185 full-time team members that facilitate the deliveries between farms and food banks and keep Farmlink running. Working closely with team leads, she tracks the execution of goals, addresses any issues with operations in real time, and ensures that The Farmlink Project’s mission of fighting food insecurity and food waste is central to everyone’s daily work.
“I really like to facilitate community and connection and people working together,” she expressed. “It’s kind of been a natural role for me.”
At Stanford, Stella studies human biology with a concentration in neurobiology supporting cognitive and behavioral health, exploring the ways that neural mechanisms influence the way we think and behave. For her, it is an area of study at the cross-section between the social sciences and the hard sciences, allowing her to explore how change can be motivated through science, empathy, and kindness.
Though her day-to-day responsibilities vary, her central goal is always to facilitate a collaborative and supportive internal community.
“A challenge is making sure everybody is heard and everybody gets taken into account when making important decisions. We don’t have a top down structure because we believe that our best ideas come from the people doing the day-to-day work,” she said. “But looking at how Farmlink can be the most effective and efficient boils down to people and individuals working together.”
Ultimately, Stella’s favorite part of her work is seeing how much amplifying individual voices and creating a sense of community can impact what the team as a whole is able to achieve.
“Looking back at it when it was just six of us trying to figure out how to rent a Penske truck, we had no idea that it was gonna become something that so many people would give their time and energy and hearts to,” she said. “And now that feels like a powerful thing.”
These changes are great. But how’s it all going to be funded?
During the comment process, Farmlink, as well as other food rescue organizations and coalitions, raised critical questions about how the strategy would be funded and, as a result, which measures are feasible. In particular, we hoped for more clarity beyond the draft’s statement that the USDA would use American Rescue Plan Act and Inflation Reduction Act funds and the EPA would use Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds. Of the 86 programs or initiatives reviewed in the final strategy, only 15 are completely new programs announced in the strategy.
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The other 71 are existing programs or initiatives that either already have a food loss and waste focus or that the national strategy has repackaged as food loss and waste solutions. While we had hopes of new, innovative programs being included in the strategy, the good news with these 71 programs is that most, if not all, are already funded, meaning that they are not reliant on an increasingly turbulent Congress for implementation. Of the 15 new programs, which included the EPA’s new consumer education campaign and several new cooperative agreements with land-grant universities, only 2 had specific funding mechanisms. It has become increasingly clear that food rescue organizations and other stakeholders in the food and agriculture space should not consider this strategy as a new rollout of FLW solutions, programs, and funding but rather as an evaluation of the current resources and solutions and how each can be most effectively utilized to achieve the strategy’s goals. In particular, the framing of many of USDA’s programs as FLW solutions offers opportunities to utilize existing funding, data, and infrastructure to solve one of the United States’s most pressing problems.
Whats next?
Now that we have the strategy, it’s time to truly take advantage of the opportunities it presents. In the immediate future at Farmlink, we’re excited to continue optimizing Section 32 as a critical on-farm food loss solution as we anticipate significant surplus recoveries in the fall. As we move forward, we continue to advocate for dignity with food distribution, emphasizing cultural appropriateness and quality in every pound of food we rescue. As outlined in our comments, food rescue organizations are critical stakeholders and thought partners for the agencies. Our inclusion in the strategy as such is an opportunity we are taking full advantage of to help guide federal action to support farmers, feed communities, and heal the planet.
< BackStella Delp’s first role at The Farmlink Project was the “lettuce lady,” calling farms to inquire about surplus greens.
After being sent home from her sophomore spring at Stanford because of the COVID-19 pandemic to complete the rest of the year’s classes over Zoom, Stella wanted to help the communities around her. When friends Aidan Reilly and James Kanoff came together to found The Farmlink Project, she was immediately on board.
“Two big things that stood out to us were this huge amount of surplus on farms being magnified by the media due to the shutdowns and at the same time a new cohort of individuals and families facing food insecurity during a pandemic. There was this jarring amount of food going to waste and families just scraping by to feed themselves,” said Stella. The team started off small, calling farmers to see if they had surplus produce and arranging transportation for food bank deliveries.
As the organization grew and took on new members, Stella transitioned away from lettuce, working as Head of People Operations. Today, she is taking a gap year from Stanford to serve as the Chief of Staff, in charge of managing the 185 full-time team members that facilitate the deliveries between farms and food banks and keep Farmlink running. Working closely with team leads, she tracks the execution of goals, addresses any issues with operations in real time, and ensures that The Farmlink Project’s mission of fighting food insecurity and food waste is central to everyone’s daily work.
“I really like to facilitate community and connection and people working together,” she expressed. “It’s kind of been a natural role for me.”
At Stanford, Stella studies human biology with a concentration in neurobiology supporting cognitive and behavioral health, exploring the ways that neural mechanisms influence the way we think and behave. For her, it is an area of study at the cross-section between the social sciences and the hard sciences, allowing her to explore how change can be motivated through science, empathy, and kindness.
Though her day-to-day responsibilities vary, her central goal is always to facilitate a collaborative and supportive internal community.
“A challenge is making sure everybody is heard and everybody gets taken into account when making important decisions. We don’t have a top down structure because we believe that our best ideas come from the people doing the day-to-day work,” she said. “But looking at how Farmlink can be the most effective and efficient boils down to people and individuals working together.”
Ultimately, Stella’s favorite part of her work is seeing how much amplifying individual voices and creating a sense of community can impact what the team as a whole is able to achieve.
“Looking back at it when it was just six of us trying to figure out how to rent a Penske truck, we had no idea that it was gonna become something that so many people would give their time and energy and hearts to,” she said. “And now that feels like a powerful thing.”
Stella Delp
Chief of Staff at The Farmlink Project
Stella Delp’s first role at The Farmlink Project was the “lettuce lady,” calling farms to inquire about surplus greens.
After being sent home from her sophomore spring at Stanford because of the COVID-19 pandemic to complete the rest of the year’s classes over Zoom, Stella wanted to help the communities around her. When friends Aidan Reilly and James Kanoff came together to found The Farmlink Project, she was immediately on board.
“Two big things that stood out to us were this huge amount of surplus on farms being magnified by the media due to the shutdowns and at the same time a new cohort of individuals and families facing food insecurity during a pandemic. There was this jarring amount of food going to waste and families just scraping by to feed themselves,” said Stella. The team started off small, calling farmers to see if they had surplus produce and arranging transportation for food bank deliveries.
As the organization grew and took on new members, Stella transitioned away from lettuce, working as Head of People Operations. Today, she is taking a gap year from Stanford to serve as the Chief of Staff, in charge of managing the 185 full-time team members that facilitate the deliveries between farms and food banks and keep Farmlink running. Working closely with team leads, she tracks the execution of goals, addresses any issues with operations in real time, and ensures that The Farmlink Project’s mission of fighting food insecurity and food waste is central to everyone’s daily work.
“I really like to facilitate community and connection and people working together,” she expressed. “It’s kind of been a natural role for me.”
At Stanford, Stella studies human biology with a concentration in neurobiology supporting cognitive and behavioral health, exploring the ways that neural mechanisms influence the way we think and behave. For her, it is an area of study at the cross-section between the social sciences and the hard sciences, allowing her to explore how change can be motivated through science, empathy, and kindness.
Though her day-to-day responsibilities vary, her central goal is always to facilitate a collaborative and supportive internal community.
“A challenge is making sure everybody is heard and everybody gets taken into account when making important decisions. We don’t have a top down structure because we believe that our best ideas come from the people doing the day-to-day work,” she said. “But looking at how Farmlink can be the most effective and efficient boils down to people and individuals working together.”
Ultimately, Stella’s favorite part of her work is seeing how much amplifying individual voices and creating a sense of community can impact what the team as a whole is able to achieve.
“Looking back at it when it was just six of us trying to figure out how to rent a Penske truck, we had no idea that it was gonna become something that so many people would give their time and energy and hearts to,” she said. “And now that feels like a powerful thing.”
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