Meet Alyson Schill of Refeed

Today we’d like to introduce you to Alyson Schill.

Alyson, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy ripped through New York City, uprooting trees and flooding neighborhoods while I crouched in a friend’s apartment, hoping my basement-dwelling by the river wasn’t flooding. Many people lost their houses all along the coast of Coney Island, Staton Island, and any places close to the shore As true New Yorkers do, everyone pulled up their bootstraps and dove in to help. Popup disaster relief centers started setting up shop immediately to aid those who had just lost everything. But the disaster didn’t stop after the weather cleared, donations and relief items came flooding in from all parts of the world. It was as if people emptied their closets and pantries, packed it up on a semi-truck, and shipped it down to the beach.

I was working then for the Grow NYC Office of Recycling Outreach and Education, and we jumped in to help with an increasing epidemic of donated clothing and textile mountains that were forming in relief areas. Trucks were dumping their load into the street where cars were still buried in sand, and large chunks of the boardwalk stuck out between them. We were trying to redistribute the wealth of resources that were flowing in back out to the areas that actually needed them. We didn’t have much time to do this before a garbage truck came by and scooped them all up as debris.

It dawned on me then, what if the emergency relief agencies could all connect digitally and share resources amongst themselves? One church that had too many cans of beans could share with an Occupy pantry that had too many noodles, etc. What if instead of spending so much time trying to figure out logistics of how to get the right resources to the right location, we could use that time rebuilding?

It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles and got involved in gleaning and food recovery specifically, that I realized how much potential this idea had. While we don’t see many hurricanes, Angelinos face a daily disaster of hunger. Just here in LA, one in seven people, including one in four children, or roughly the size of the population of the San Fernando Valley faces hunger and food insecurity. For all or at least part of the month, they rely on the assistance of government aid or free food distribution centers. Not just homeless people, but families, college students, the elderly, minorities, etc. are all struggling to find food. Meanwhile, we’re throwing away 40% of the food we grow and produce in America. And then I realized, there is no reason why these two problems can’t be simultaneously tackled with a little boost from technological assistance. That’s why my partner and I created Refeed.

In 2016, I had been working with the LA Food Policy Council for a few years on food waste prevention and recovery for the city when I was introduced to a bright, young tech genius, Marques Dawson. He wanted to build a food recovery app but didn’t know how to begin. I wanted a food recovery app but didn’t know how to build it. The partnership clicked and we were off to the races.

Great, 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?
Of course, starting a tech company is never as easy as you’d imagine. There are tremendous costs. You’re at risk for constant snags. Our storage platform was hacked by bitcoin miners. Marques was hit by a car on his way to a meeting with me. I lost my only brother to suicide. As life always finds a way, so does chaos always find entrepreneurs. No matter how important the work is that you’re trying to do, you are still limited to the confines of creating an economically sustainable model.

Please tell us about Refeed.
My partner and I have been relentlessly building the app for three years now, perfecting the version that will best assist not only the nonprofits that redistribute resources, but opening the app up so that they can connect directly with businesses and individual donors like grocery stores, restaurants, weddings, films crews and more. We’re also connecting it all back directly to those who need the food the most to find a local nonprofit near them. The technology is nearly complete now. And we can’t wait to show the world when it is done.

Refeed is the ultimate tool to redistribute the wealth of resources that we have, from those with too much abundance back to those in need. We are free to use to donate food, find a meal, or assist a nonprofit in filling their shelves and freezers up with wholesome, surplus food that was bound for the landfill. We focus on connecting communities and the members within a community that want to put an end to hunger and food waste. We’re taking a huge system of resources, and enhancing it with the same type of technology that keeps us in touch with old classmates and streams videos of cats all day.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I grew up in Central Washington, surrounded by orchards. In the summertime, I’d run through the orchards picking cherries, asparagus, and edible flowers. Then I’d come home and have a foraged feast. Nature was my playground. It taught me that we are constantly in a relationship with the natural world, that both gives and takes from us. We may feel far away from it with the city, but it still exists with us regardless; in the water from our taps, the pollen in our wind, the produce piled symmetrically in the markets, and the spiders on our fences. Just like a web, we’re connected to each other and to all the rocks and trees and birds and bees. We just forget sometimes.