Big empty spaces have always held a power over me: abandoned amusement parks, the expansiveness of Monument Valley, or the Black Rock Desert. Maybe it’s the blank slate they provide, the place for something to take place that just a few minutes prior had never existed. Space pregnant with possibility. This might be why the nearly century-old 18,000 square feet of warehouse in industrial Southeast LA that Food Forward’s Produce Pit Stop calls home is one of my favorite places to sit as day turns to night: a three foot cement slab under foot, forty foot high bow and truss ceilings arching overhead, patina-ed brick and hazed-over windows look out at the last glints of LA light as the sun starts to set. As much joy as I get from watching the blur of produce flying by for hours on the days I am here, I savor the rare stillness of this building at day’s end, when the team that has been here from 4 or 5 in the morning, have all headed home; leaving hundreds of pallets nestled in the fridge, and the freshly scrubbed floor conjuring a now silent stage awaiting to spring to action before dawn the next day.
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Today, January 17, 2024, marks Food Forward’s 15th birthday. Besides the occasional rattle of the roll-up doors from the wind off the 710 freeway, a stone's throw away, I’m alone with tens of thousands of avocados, bananas, mangos, Roma tomatoes (and any number of other visiting fruits or vegetables) and my thoughts. What better a place to look back from?
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The first tangerines we ever harvested on January 17, 2009
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In this stretch of time, I have had the front row seat to so much—from a rag-tag first harvest of 85 pounds off a neighbor’s tangerine tree, to closing the books on 2023’s record 87,000,000 pound year. Either of these events are a powerful milestone, but it’s been what is in between them that hold so much meaning:
- 2009: Four people that didn’t know one another banding together in my living room committed to taking a few successful orange harvests and making it something more.
- 2012: Having our very first glean at a farmers market—the BIG Wednesday Santa Monica edition—not just work out, but be so successful that an additional pick-up truck was deployed to deliver produce to a second hunger relief partner.
- 2015: Representing Food Forward at the International Fast Pitch competition in Austin, which I somehow volunteered to be on stage for less than 48 hours after leaving that year’s Burning Man festival. I will never know how after completely blanking on my pitch—and I mean BLANKING—at the final dress rehearsal, I somehow rebounded and walked away with two of the top prizes.
- 2016: Attending the memorial for Jim Mangis, the former manager of our branch in Ventura, who passed while under our employ. He was a man devoted to building, sharing, and setting the tone for how we could show up each day with a sense of purpose in the most selfless of ways.
- 2019: Diving into the unknown of renting and renovating a cold dank warehouse and dealing daily for nine months with the stress, costs, delays, design changes, while accepting the imperfections and then embracing the entirely new world it brought us into.
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All these share the same foundation: building out an organization that unlocks something unique in the participant. In the first year or two I cultivated this unwittingly, but as I began to understand Food Forward’s uniqueness and potential, and the “fruit family” grew with more hearts and minds joining us, things became more intentional: first with volunteers as a starting point, but then inviting in produce donors, financial donors, staff, board members, and so many other stakeholders. An organization based on a single action—sharing—was built. Along the way, I learned sharing is an act, which uniquely activates the giver in everyone, as well as what a rare gift it is to be part of something this pure and impactful, in the nonprofit world or beyond. In the first couple of years of this outing, if someone had said we would be where we are a decade and a half after stealthily dumpster diving at the local Costco for boxes and overfilling them with Valley Glen’s finest tangerines, I’d have laughed. Really?? An organization that devoted itself to being the Robin Hood of fresh produce and feeding millions of people who otherwise would not have access to it? Give me a break!
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What we’ve learned along the way is what is possible from the abundance of nature, in the empathy unlocked by every part of the work, in the impact of logistics being stretched and pushed in new and forward-thinking ways.
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It’s this sense of possibility that keeps me coming back for more each year. Though I’ve talked about the sense of “possibility” and “abundance” for much of the time we’ve been around, with the fragile and volatile world we’ve walked through during our brief lifespan, these are words, concepts, touchstones, which are amazing gifts we should never feel hesitant to return to and be nourished by. I don’t get the chance to get up in the trees much anymore, and though at times I mourn that—not just the immediacy and physicality of harvesting fruit, but also the cradling one feels when locked into the limbs of twisting wood, which also hold the miraculous ability to grow things that sustain life—I realize Food Forward is at a different stage in its life, and we’d never have been able to scale to our current impact if I was still swinging from branches. I can’t wait to see where the next decade and a half take this not-so-scrappy and not-so-little organization. Happy Birthday to us! 🍊
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Rick Nahmias Founder & CEO, Food Forward, Inc.
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P.S. Save the date for our Spring Melt event—Saturday, April 20, 2024.
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