L&L Speaker Interview – Sasha Purpura, Food For Free
Meet Sasha Purpura, the Executive Director of Food For Free in Cambridge, MA. Sasha came to our Lunch & Learn session to talk more about her work in turning surplus food into meaningful donations to the local community. She talked about how food rescue works and some of the newer and more unique solutions she is implementing with her food donor and recipient partners.
Watch Sasha’s Lunch and Learn talk here.
How did you become interested in what you do now at Food For Free?
I had a background not related to food at all; I was in the tech industry. When I met my husband, we were both working at Nokia, and he had always gardened intensely and I’ve always wanted to work at a farm. Then in 2005, my husband quit his job to start farming full-time, and supporting him do that was an incredible experience for me. Helping him start the farm, finding out more about how food is produced and tasting it had really triggered my passion to know more about food systems. So that was the beginning of my transition and after that, I went back to school to get my MBA in sustainability, knowing that food was the key component of it. But even then, I still was not thinking deeply about food justice but it was mostly about the local food systems. And surreptitiously, when I was looking for jobs after graduation, I just happened upon Food For Free. I think I was really lucky to have landed here, because I fell in love right away. What I loved about it was that I got to run an organization, it had to do with food and farms, and more importantly, working at Food For Free expanded what I had cared about, which were healthy food systems, to include the ideas of food justice. So that is how I ended up here, and I feel very lucky.
How would you describe the people who work at your organization?
We have a total of sixteen staff members, ranging from drivers to office employees. Many of our drivers come from the community, and at some point in their lives may have used the emergency food systems, so they are really great at understanding exactly what they do. Our office staff is really diverse. We seem to attract a lot of smart people, which is fantastic and I would say that there is a mix of two categories of people. Some of our employees are mission driven, which means they are really passionate about feeding people; Then there are people who aren’t mission driven like myself. These people are really passionate about running a strong organization and doing great work that they love doing. Our employees have very different backgrounds, so we are a collective of people that are very caring, smart, passionate about food, and really eager to do well in what we do. Our team really feels like a family.
For undergraduate students at Tufts who are interested in working at an environmentally driven organization like Food For Free, would you recommend going to a graduate school?
I think it is really hard to figure out what you really want to do when you are young and still in college. So I would recommend getting an internship or volunteer experience at a significant capacity after finishing undergraduate studies, because you get to experience what it is like to work at an organization. And I think going to a graduate school is less important. Not a lot of people end up doing directly related to what their degree was, and I think that skills you will learn through internships and volunteering are equally if not more important than what you will get out of graduate school studies.
Are there volunteer opportunities at Food For Free?
Family Meals and Packaging is one of the opportunities, we also have home delivery programs. In the summer, we look for volunteers who can help us with our organic farms and food distribution. Also, there is a Cambridge Weekend Back Program, through which we send kids with breakfast and lunch meals back home on the weekends. There are also office and event help opportunities—and all of these information and more details about the different options are listed on our website.