[music] LA is so rich in so many different things, there's so much food here. It makes you sit and wonder
how a place that is so rich, how so many people
can be struggling, especially to eat. Food Cycle Los Angeles is focused
on feeding people, not landfills. We are introducing
innovative technology into that space to try and make sure that food, which is a major contributor
to climate change when it's wasted, is instead going directly
to help people who are most in need. We're about to head out to Sprouts Venice. They've got bread products
and produce for us, and we're going to pick that up
and take it over to feeding families. What distinguishes us a bit
is that food that I'm redirecting today is food that I'm picking up
from a grocery store or a restaurant that might be superficially damaged. It doesn't get composted. It's just thrown away,
and basically it's still good to be eaten, so we will redirect that food
to people who need it. One of our main goals is to change
the infrastructure of food waste, and we're doing that by incorporating
the use of electric vehicles, our Chow Match app. Chow Match is an app
that we use to connect volunteers with food retailers so that we're reducing
the amount of food that gets wasted at grocery stores,
farmers markets and restaurants. More and more people
are becoming food insecure. Some of the distributions before 2020,
we're serving 300 families a week, now they're serving 1000 families a week. We're the three co-founders
of Feeding Families Santa Monica. I started cooking
home cooked dinners once a month at the church and the café. Then it just blossomed from there. [Spanish language] Food Cycle LA has been
such a tremendous blessing for what they've done
for our food bank to make it even bigger and starting from a two car garage
and helping over a million people last year. It's all about getting the word out
that makes the difference. People are very interconnected
and technology allows us to use those connections
between communities, and to work together to make
a much bigger difference in people's lives. We as an organization
try to look beyond just recovering food into addressing the systemic issues, the barriers in the food system
that needed to be attacked creatively. I just want to say to people we're all there. We're here to give people hope. Not only food, but we give them hope. This is my lifeline to the world. I look forward to getting up every morning
and coming in here and every day is a blessing. Every day. [music]
