Channel 13 News Piece Featuring Food Rescue on the Changing Face of Hunger

Last week Food Rescue was featured on a news story by channel 13 regarding the changing face of hunger.   Thanks to Jennifer Carmack Brilliant for spotlighting the great work of the all of the Little Caesars franchises here in Indiana, as well as Food Link, one of our partners.   Hopefully this well deserved positive attention will shine a spotlight on the need, and others will follow Little Caesars’ lead.  I already received tweets from the Indiana Restaurant Association, and Neal Brown from Pizzology about getting involved, as well as John Ackerman with YelpIndy about getting involved.  The story is below.

News Story

What in the World is Going On?

It’s amazing that Food Rescue continues to receive inquiries from all over the world each month.   This month I received an email from Sutharson Jayakamar in India.  He works with  a public charitable trust called Siragugal http://siragugal.org/.   They are very interested and involved in combatting food waste world-wide, and we have exchanged emails on collaborating to make a difference in world together.  He discovered Food Rescue simply by researching the topic of food waste on the Internet.  From Malaysia to Australia, and India and beyond, food waste is clearly a world-wide issue beyond the 27% that is wasted every day in our country.

Revelation

Give me Revelation.  That’s what it says on the whiteboard above my office desk.    It’s a  quote from one of my favorite Third Day songs reminding me that there is always something just beyond my reach that is far greater than anything I can imagine.  Something I cannot discover on my own.

Lately, rather than being thankful for being able to feed over a million people since 2008, my mind has been haunted by the crippling thought of what we have not been able to accomplish.  I’ve been telling myself if I communicated just the right thing to a corporate executive of a national food chain, or if I could connect with just the right person, millions more would be fed.  As these thoughts flooded my mind, I’ve been overcome  by a dark cloud of depression at times by own  inability to make things happen on my timetable.   Ironically, this cloud of depression veiled in nobility is really an arrogance that places me in a higher position than God intended.

Revelation.

The common theme of all of those thoughts is “I”.   As a 40 year old man, I’d never mentioned taking food to anybody in need in my entire life, and have often noted in speaking engagements that only a fool could believe I did any of this, yet here I find myself thinking that “my” job is to fix this problem, and fix it right now.    In all of that narcissism,  I recalled the springboard that Food Rescue has been in so many lives according to so many of our volunteers, and I thought about all the pictures that have been sent to me of the children that have taken food to caring agencies.   Perhaps there is always something greater going on than meets the eye.    Something greater than “I” can control.

Maybe something like this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_uwWPE6lQ

 Thank God for Revelation.

Exact Target 2011 Connections Conference

Bryndon Preston, Vice President of Food Rescue, and I were able to attend ET 2011 Connections Conference due to the generosity of their company.   Thanks to Scott Dorsey and Tim Kopp for making this possible.  It was an incredible opportunity to connect with top-level marketers in the country, including social media directors for brands such as Hardees, Great Wolf Lodge, Southwest Airlines, Best Buy, and many others.   We also connected with Jim Kukral, author of the book “Attention: This Book Will Make You Money”, and Jim conducted an interview for a podcast about Food Rescue that can be heard here.  Thanks Jim.  Our experience only confirmed that the Food Rescue Flash Mob  is a great avenue to influence national corporations as well as local food establishments to give away their extra food.