What can God do with a flier? The Food Rescue Story.
Most of you by now want some of the details on how this started so you can perhaps use the blueprint in your area, and this will be in story form with no advice, just what happened here in Indy.
I put a flier in the box of a home in my community advertising for real estate listings in Aug. of 2007, and someone called me and said, “I’m not going to sell me home, but I am just calling to tell you you have a really good business idea”. We spoke for awhile, and in the end he prayed for me and my business. I had never met him before. His name was/is Bryndon Preston, and we ended up having lunch together and became friends. Food Rescue was not a thought in my mind.
By now, you all know the story about my wife reading the article on Freegans, and my journey to 4 food establishments. Once I was awarded a day from Panera bread to pick up the food, I sent an email to the outreach pastor at our church, Susie Bennett, and she gave me the name of several organizations/food banks that might have interest. After securing a Food Bank called Third Phase in Noblesville IN, I sent an email to a few friends asking who would like to participate with me. Many said “Yes”. I began to request more and more days, and I just took responsibility to pick up with my family on the extra days, along with many people who were serving multiple days. Bryndon was one who chimed in with a “yes”, saying this is what he had been looking for in terms of a way to serve the Lord with his talents.
He basically went crazy, contacting newspapers, television outlets, restaurants, and friends spreading the news of Food Rescue service opportunities. I sat back and scheduled everything and kept track of it all. He recruited David and Luke Baldwin to design, host, and update a website for Food Rescue, and a friend of mine named Wendy Hatch designed a wonderful logo that so many have given positive comments. One day at 8:30 A.M., the phone rang and it was our local NBC station wanting to film a spot at 10:00 A.M. . Off of that spot we recruited 30 volunteers, one of which was a chapter president, Alison, for the South side of Indianapolis. Still haven’t met Alison, which is one of the amazing things about Food Rescue. Along the way a friend of mine named DJ Humphrey went in and recruited Big Apple Bagels completely on his own. “Thanks DJ, now I need 30 more volunteers was my thought at the time” , but God provided the volunteers pretty quickly. At one point I had to consider how much food we are picking up, and when I added it all up it was nuts, and I began to consider the hyper growth we had and how crazy easy this was to do. So, I started asking my national contact at Panera to tell me where they had trouble finding people to serve, meaning what cities, and I just started googling food pantries, churches, and organizations with a copy/paste boilerplate email. Then I started posting on Craigslist under “Community” and “Volunteers”, and then everything silliness really began. A television in Arlington called me out of the blue for an interview, and I asked how they heard about Food Rescue, and they said, “we Googled you”.
Some friends told me I needed to start having people write down their stories and post them on the website, and that I needed to start “blogging”. I said, “Start what?” I didn’t know a blog from a frog. Still don’t really, but I did it anyway. One day my phone rang and it was a Food Rescue volunteer who I had never met named Jon Duch. His message to me was simple: “Dude, you are running all of this out of a hotmail account. You can’t do that!” I said, “Why?” He told me why, but I don’t remember the answer, all I know was that he worked for some Email software marketing company and that he was very convincing in his argument, even if I did not understand it. So, I said, “what am I supposed to do then?” He told me he wanted to get some software donated from his CEO Scott Dorsey, so that I could wake up and enter this century basically. He and his friend at Exact Target Darrel Grissom began to work on some platforms for me to work out of, and they scheduled a meeting for me to meet their CEO.
The meeting went well, and Scott Dorsey, the CEO of Exact Target became a key supporter of Food Rescue. Along the way I lost my job for the second time in a 16 month period, all the while Food Rescue was becoming a monster. If I spent 5 minutes working on it, that 5 minutes meant 10 minutes more work later. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire. I taught school before going into real estate, and I had and interview in the school system that I worked for 9 years. The superintendent of schools, the director of education, and several area principals were my recommendations for the position, and I did not even make the final 3, and yet Food Rescue continued to grow at an alarming rate, so much that I completely stopped developing Indianapolis, just to keep my head above water.
On July 11th, 2008, I formed Food Rescue Inc and registered with the State of Indiana to become a not for profit business, and I committed myself to this mission full time, and am currently being supported by 12 families/corporations on a monthly basis. Grace Community Church, my home church in Noblesville has embraced Food Rescue as a “Frontline Ministry”, which led to a video being played in 4 services 10 days ago, and 155 families signed up to serve. The week before I had taped an interview with a nationally syndicated radio program called K Love with 3 million listeners that ran intermittently last week, and Food Rescue has had 72 inquiries to date on how to start a Food Rescue chapter from all around the country, as our 14 chapter presidents have done. To date we have well over 500 volunteers, and are well over a million dollars of annually scheduled retail food rescues, ALL of which was being thrown away until Food Rescue volunteers stepped in to intervene.
We are 25% of the way toward fully funding the Executive Director position for Food Rescue, and there are really very few other expenses. If you would consider being a family or corporate sponsor of Food Rescue to feed people in need in our country, please email me at jw@foodrescue.net and I would be glad to answer any questions.
God bless,
John Williamson
