Meet Hayden Dansky

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Hayden Dansky.

Hayden, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Food binds our world together, simultaneously serving as a universal experience (we all need to eat) and a thriving, diverse multitude of experiences across cultures, languages, and time.

I started this work long before I had the language and context to describe it, as a child who paid attention. My friends were immigrants from large families working blue-collar jobs. I grew up watching the resource exchange in communities that don’t have abundant and easy access to resources and the cultural exchange that happens through reciprocity and sharing food.

My mom delivering clothing she got from her work and being met with thank yous in the form of eggrolls that filled my siblings and I up for days. After my mother and brother died, I was primarily raised in a single-parent household, where most of my food was from a freezer or can that I could pull out alone after school. Food was a survival mechanism, a bland exchange between my body and life, a source of consumption to fill the loneliness.

These varying experiences of food & community vs. food & isolation taught me more about my work today than any workshop, class, or professional development opportunity. As a young adult, I found the intersection of food & community again. My friends and I saw the immense amount of food going to waste and started asking questions: Why? Why is it wasted? Why not be picked up by food banks? Why are so many people restricted from accessing this resource being hoarded in our landfill?

Who can access food pantries, and who cannot, and why? What are they asked to do to get food? It’s the questions that drove our work into the thriving, evolving, radical, and responsive food rescue model we have today.

In 2010, we started a meal in the park, where hundreds of people would show up every Saturday. There were no rules: anybody could cook, clean, serve, eat, suggest, teach, play music, and more. We used the meal as a way to organize among folks with no housing, understand each other’s experiences, and brainstorm ways to advocate for each other’s survival.

Relationships became our work. Food became our language. From there, we learned this meal differed because “we all sat down and ate together.” We blurred the lines between those who have resources and those who do not, those who have power and those who do not.

We started distributing food beyond just our meal. We asked grocery stores for donations and quickly went from one store donating once a week to five stores donating daily. We built and mobilized a base of over 100 volunteers to distribute the food and met more people in the communities living in affordable housing sites.

We created what we now call “the No Cost Grocery Program,” a site for food distribution in easy-to-access places, such as affordable housing, pre-schools, or daycares, run by people who live or work at those places.

This work did not get built by me alone. While I was put into a position of leadership, my leadership was mostly about how to create the spaces for everyone to become leaders, to give input, and to collectively design in ways that work for the most people. This is still true today.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what challenges have you had to overcome?
We built this organization from the ground up. While much larger now, Boulder Food Rescue is still grassroots in many ways, and that comes with many challenges, primarily facing the demands of philanthropy, society, and life under capitalism. Nonprofits are expected to do a lot on a little it’s praised. But we also deserve to live in the world we are trying to create.

Our martyrdom doesn’t actually lead to the dream world we intend. If we burn out, which many nonprofit staff do, again, are expected to, then our safety nets burn, we cause harm to our teams, and we cause harm to the people we intend to serve. An example of how this shows up day to day: Philanthropy is built in a system where organizations are expected to do more and more each year. The problem is we are already doing too much on too little. Also, the cost of living has gone up significantly, so the cost of running the program has gone up significantly.

So if you get the same amount year after year, you’re actually getting a smaller percentage of what it costs to run that program, but you are expected to do more. This is the type of barrier that nonprofits face every day, which leads to burnout and the loss of our people. I dream of a world where nonprofit staff are praised not for how hard they work on so little but because they can care for our community while simultaneously caring for themselves. We are in it for the long haul, and I want to help build the systems of support that enable us to be in this for the long haul.

There are other struggles – nonprofits are also pitted against each other. Small food organizations are all competing for resources when we should be solving hunger together. Large national institutional nonprofits hoard resources (money, & food; see Feeding America) and prevent smaller grassroots community-led organizations from accessing them, instead letting communities have autonomy and decision-making power.

Instead of being able to work on root cause issues, like solving poverty to thus solve food insecurity, we spend our time competing with one another instead of working together to address the real issues.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Boulder Food Rescue is a community-led nonprofit that works to create a more just and less wasteful food system. We use the sustainable distribution of produce as a mechanism to meet the survival needs of people, interrupt the systems that create that need, and leverage participatory systems of leadership and collective action.

One in three people in Colorado lack reliable access to nutritious food, affecting their long-term health and well-being. Hunger disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, people living with disabilities, immigrants, seniors, LBGTQ+ people, and those with less access to employment opportunities and living wages.

Meanwhile, 40% of food in this country is wasted. To meet daily survival needs, charitable food organizations distribute food to people. While emergency food relief is necessary for survival, it comes with barriers that prevent people from using services. These include limited hours of operation, transportation barriers, poverty-proving requirements, shame, stigma, language barriers, and massive gaps between income limits for benefits and the amount of money required to live.

We formed to support the direct distribution of food that people want and need to survive while using food as a community tool to build relationships and address the root causes of food insecurity: poverty, economic uncertainty, climate change, and systemic racism.

We collect donated food and take it to resident-created and operated community food distribution sites, such as No Cost Grocery Programs (NCGPs). We deliver food to people in easy-to-access places such as the affordable housing communities they live in or the schools and daycares they attend, removing as many prohibitive barriers as possible. We distribute 1,500 pounds of produce daily, and as much as possible, we do so by bicycle to make deliveries environmentally sustainable.

Participants of our No Cost Grocery Programs live in low-income housing or use other services designated for low-income people in Boulder. It is important to us not to ask for demographic information at NCGP to provide a barrier-free environment for accessing food. Our community has told us many times that when they have paperwork to fill out to receive food, they feel like they have to “prove their poverty” to be worthy of taking food. BFR’s current model has built up the power of residents over the last 12 years, which makes this program possible.

The trust developed over this time is the foundation for implementing new programs that move from trust-based emergency food relief to autonomous and self-sustaining food access programs. We support community power by facilitating community-led food distribution, supporting community-initiated programming, engaging in leadership development, and investing in relationships so we can understand and respond to community food needs and desires.

We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
Success is the combination of dreaming the world we wish into existence while creating day-to-day steps to reach that dream world and celebrating the work we do along the way, treating each other with respect and care. It’s creating microcosms of utopias within the dystopia.

Our dream: Every community is part of and well-provided by a food system that is healthy for all beings and the earth. This looks like:

– All people have the resources they need to thrive beyond day-to-day survival.
– All people have the time, energy, information, and economic capacity to make desired food choices.
– Food and resources in the food system are cultivated without exploitation of communities and the earth. Instead, food is produced in a way that creates mutual and reciprocal relationships with people and the land.
– All people easily access foods that are nourishing and hold a connection to their communities and culture.

Contact Info:

• Website: boulderfoodrescue.org
• Instagram: @boulder_food_rescue
• Facebook: Facebook.com/BoulderFoodRescue
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HI4y3NwTs4

Image Credits
Michael Benko & Lou Creech