Carleton College
EN-10: Community Partnerships

Food Recovery Network (FRN) is a national organization that unites students to fight waste and feed people by donating surplus food from their colleges to local community partner organizations. Carleton’s chapter recovers food from Burton and LDC dining halls and Sayles Cafe every weeknight and involves over 50 student, faculty, and staff volunteers each term. Carleton’s student-led FRN delivers recovered food to six organizations serving food-insecure community members in Northfield and Faribault. They recover food six days a week with an average of 300 pounds a week from the dining halls. The seven community partners are Greenvale Community School, Northfield Food Shelf, Area Learning Center, The Key, Faribault Adult learning Center, and Emmaus Baptist Church. This year Carleton's FRN expanded their retail rescue efforts to two mornings a week, they recovery from two large grocery retailers every Monday and Thursday and deliver that food directly to the local food shelf. Last year Carleton's FRN delivered over 100,000 pounds of food to their community partners. In addition to this direct service, Carleton’s FRN also raises awareness on campus about issues of food waste and food insecurity--locally and nationally. The national Food Recovery Network website is https://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/ and the Carleton chapter Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/CarletonFRN/

The Greater Northfield Sustainability Collaborative brings together participants from Carleton College and St. Olaf College and various community organizations to facilitate and coordinate sustainability initiatives in the greater Northfield area and to support implementation of Northfield’s commitment to the Minnesota Greenstep Cities Program and the recently adopted City of Northfield climate action plan. Carleton hosts the GNSC website and maintains its content. The complementary Northfield Sustainability Facebook page promotes sustainability and climate resiliency efforts, this social media page is managed by a Carleton student. Carleton's Center for Community and Civic Engagement provided a Carleton intern during the summer of 2019 to the city of Northfield's sustainability office.
The GNSC website is http://northfieldsustainability.org/
The MN Green Step Cities website is https://greenstep.pca.state.mn.us/index.cfm
City of Northfield Sustainability website is https://www.ci.northfield.mn.us/1306/Sustainability
Northfield Sustainability Facebook page @northfieldsustainabilty

Carleton College partnered with the Northfield Community Action Center and the City of Northfield to write a Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Grant to increase the amount of recovered food available for the community through additional refrigeration at the food shelf. The grant was awarded and the food shelf added a walk-in cooler/freezer in February of 2019. This new refrigeration infrastructure has dramatically increased the availability of fresh food to Northfield area residents and assisted with their SuperShelf transformation. Carleton plans to review purchasing data and other impacts of this infrastructure. Carleton's Center for Community and Civic Engagement provided a Carleton intern for the summer of 2019. The community partner reported that the Carleton summer intern program is transformative to their organization. In 2020 Carleton academic research course and co-curricular programs assisted the CAC in the creation of a satellite food shelf in Northfield's poorest neighborhood. Carleton students wrote a grant securing $30,000 in funding for the new food shelf.
Community Action Center of Northfield https://communityactioncenter.org/programs/feeding/
SuperShelf Minnesota https://www.supershelfmn.org/

Carleton College's "Lighten Up" garage sale is a partnership between three community partners, Special Olympics, Project Friendship and the Northfield Union of Youth. Each spring members of the Carleton community collect the items left on campus by departing students and then sell the items in a large garage sale. The community partners provide the volunteers to sort and prepare the items for sale, earning them a split of the proceeds. The 2019 sale brought in $40,000 dollars and diverted over 25 tons from the landfill.
Although we did not hold a sale in 2020 due to covid, we did collect move out materials from seniors and distribute those materials throughout the summer in collaboration with community partners.