Meet Ali Stone of Conscious Alliance

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ali Stone.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

Conscious Alliance started with the simple idea of hosting a food drive at a concert. Our founders were in college when they saw the potential for turning a crowd of music lovers into a powerful force of community builders.

We held our first, ‘Art That Feeds’ Food Drive with The String Cheese Incident at The Fillmore Auditorium in Denver in 2002. Concertgoers were invited to donate non-perishable food in exchange for a limited-edition event poster. We collected 4,000 meals at our first food drive which helped support our work on Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the most impoverished areas in the country, just six hours north of the Front Range. Our ‘Art That Feeds’ Food Drive program grew tenfold in the last 19 years allowing us to partner with over 119 musicians and festivals and 130 poster artists to feed the local communities in which live music takes place.

Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is at the heart of our founding story. Our relationship with the community run deep as we’ve continued to show up to provide resources to families on the Reservation; in addition to distributing food and supplies through our network of schools, community partners, and holiday meal deliveries, we also own and stock a food pantry on the Reservation which serves 50 families each week.

Our work caught the attention of Whole Foods in 2008 who donated 400 tons of non-perishable food ($1 Million worth of products) and helped expand our operations to work with natural brands to distribute large-scale donations by the truckload. Conscious Alliance now works with over 60 food maker to route food by the pallet to families in need all across the country.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

We started as a grassroots organization fueled by the power of volunteers and have overcome maybe growing pains along the way. First, we learned the ins and outs of touring with bands to host successful ‘Art That Feeds’ Food Drives. We quickly learned we could apply our experience working in the music industry to logistics to move more food.

With greater volumes of donated food, we had to make new relationships with trucking and warehouse partners to help expand our operations. This meant truck and equipment rentals and finding warehouse space to store and sort food. As we honed in on our ability to move large-scale volumes of food, we had to find ways to develop new relationships outside of the music industry with food brands to help provide the food.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

As Director of Marketing and Digital Partnerships, I am responsible for our overall brand presence and creating unique partnership opportunities with brands, musicians, artists, and community advocates. I love working on our end-of-the-year fundraising campaign, “On The Road to End Hunger” because it brings supporters at all levels together in the belief that food is a basic right and all families deserve a meal.

I enjoy working hand-in-hand with partners to bring our mission to life through personalized fundraising and awareness campaigns while also supporting the brand’s goal to give back. Shifting my career from corporate America to the non-profit sector has been my biggest accomplishment. We all get frustrated at work and have bad days sometimes, but when the going gets tough it’s an amazing feeling to know your bottom line is feeding people in need.

Through my work at Conscious Alliance, I’ve realized the power of community and how all actions, no matter the size, MATTER.

What was your favorite childhood memory?

I have fond memories of road tripping with my parents and sister in our family minivan. We never took traditional vacations, we always drove and our end destinations were always historical sites (my mom was an elementary school history teacher) or camping in nature.

We weren’t allowed to have a lot of sugary snacks growing up and I loved being able to pick out a “fun” cereal and favorite artificial snack (fruit snacks!) as road trip treats. I remember my dad using big books of maps to navigate us, and can’t help but think in the digital age how easy it is now to explore new locations now.

These trips helped instill my deep love for music as The Grateful Dead was always the soundtrack of these trips.

Contact Info:

• Email: support@consciousalliance.org
• Website: ConsciousAlliance.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/consciousalliance
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConsciousAlliance/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArtThatFeeds
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/consciousalliance

Image Credits
Tobin Voggesser (NO COAST), Peter Wallace (Wallyography), Maureen O’Neill, BJ Cochran, and Michael Yaremchuk