Anna Kawiecki

GFI Fellow - Class of 2021

Graduate student, epidemiology
UC Davis

DESCRIPTION

2021-22 GFI student fellow

Anna will be working with The Night Market, which is an environmentally sustainable community-based initiative that recovers excess prepared food from retail establishments and restaurants and directly redistributes it to feed local communities in a stigma-free environment, directly addressing both food waste and food insecurity. The broader mission of the market is to promote the adoption of community-based food recovery systems everywhere, by demonstrating the positive impact they can have as well as by developing online resources that facilitate their adoption. The market’s aims are to improve the measurement of impact by developing a streamlined data collection system that will be used to improve the tracking of the number of individuals fed, the emissions averted, and donor retention. The data they collect will help concretize the impact that community-based food rescue programs can have, promoting adoption and support from communities and larger organizations, possibly even in easing local government restrictions. To make this food recovery system reproducible anywhere by developing open-source online resource, they will develop intuitive open-source guidelines and tutorials that walk through the steps of establishing our system in other cities, both the legal requirements and infrastructure needed.