Rethink Your Purpose, Repair The World | Ashley Stanley | TEDxBeaconStreet
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TajxYrGXo54 Video ID: TajxYrGXo54 ============================================================ at the onset of kovid back in march my grandmother passed away not of kovid but the pandemic prevented our very spread out family from a proper funeral from coming together to grieve to remember to pay the incredible respect that her legacy deserved and continues to deserve she was the last surviving member of the holocaust in my family the last first-person narrative the last true guardian of our legacy she was my mema and we were really close with her i talked about pretty much everything for the better part of my life and she shared so much with me about hers she was born in 1919 in vienna but she hadn't been in the almost 70 years since hitler had taken power before we went back and she had vowed never to return but with that trip she and i went she indulged me a true walking tour of our family's history because i wanted to know i wanted to see the city that made my great grandfather a successful businessman only to abandon him and so many others when the nazis came and when we arrived we walked and walked and walked we literally retraced her childhood from happier times passing her elementary school catching the lip is on her horses that she used to watch as a child and we ate sauerbratten and schnitzel and strudel with ice cream every day that we were there i remember every moment observing the pure nostalgia fighting with the resentment and grief and anguish of war that were at every literal turn she pointed out the department store that the family had owned schools that she and her brother went to the now ritzy shopping districts and of course the house she grew up in every now and then she would shake her head and say out loud no one stood up no one took a stand i wasn't sure if she was saying it to me or to the city but i was listening and in an extraordinary turn of events she had gotten in touch with a dear childhood friend of hers and both of them with the same name lottie two friends on opposite sides of a war surviving a lifetime with memories that nobody should ever have they sat down to share a meal together and i won't ever forget that watching them chat away in a free vienna mima and latiji who was offering me bites of lunch from her own spoon it was surreal and kind of conflicting i mean here i was a second generation american granddaughter of survivors breaking bread and literally sharing silverware with someone who would have otherwise just been sort of a generalized character in the history that i had been taught and this friendship would have been and in many ways kind of was just a casualty of war but that was not just having lunch it was a moment of grace of compassion and some healing it was powerful i still can't eat sherred eggs without being right in that moment it's a forever food memory for sure a few days after my grandmother passed i eulogized her over email and included a passage that she had written for her father almost 35 years before but he was an extraordinary man not alone in the sense that he was a success many people have achieved greater financial gains and wider fame than he but what i believe to be more valuable for us who knew him and understood him was his deep compassion for those in need and his capacity to love he was proud and he tried to be just he was human and he made mistakes he loved people he loved god he believed he was his brother's keeper and he lived his life in the spirit my grandmother believed that too and i realized in founding my company that i did as well i started to think a lot about people who may have been in a position in vienna back then really anywhere who could help if they had stood up if they had done something differently would that have made a difference and i think about that a lot my great grandfather my grandmother and my great uncle arriving in the united states in 1938 as refugees throughout their lives they were determined to give back to the country that accepted and welcomed our family at ellis island the gratitude that i saw from them left a profound impact on me and i've realized that my own sense of patriotism has come back to the life that they created here in america for me it's always come back to to feeling so incredibly lucky that our history our luck really brought us such an opportunity when it didn't for so many others as i continue to get older my adult life has really been a lot about reconnecting to my family history and realizing what's important to me what i'm passionate about what matters so about a year ago fast forward i was sitting in my office and my colleagues and i were talking about what a great year 2020 was going to be i know right we were looking forward to celebrating 10 years of love and spoonfuls the company that i founded back in 2010. then the idea for love and spoonfuls was really just to understand more about why there was so much food being produced and then thrown away while poverty and hunger were daily realities for so many people what i found in that was an opportunity to respond and challenge some of the old ideas with a little bit of a new one that hunger wasn't a problem of supply it's a problem of distribution and so now 10 years later 11 spoonfuls is a distribution and logistics company working in the social service space having rescued and distributed over 17 million pounds of fresh healthy food that would have otherwise gone to waste feeding 30 000 people each week in communities that are hit the hardest by the economic social and health injustices and inequalities that exist in our communities sometimes it feels like 10 years and sometimes it feels like 10 minutes and there is always more to do but 10 years itself is a long time and looking back a decade ago i was sort of at a crossroads in both my personal and my professional life looking for some clarity looking for some direction i was turning 30 i was sober about a decade having cleaned up from an alcohol and heroin addiction i had just moved back from boston after thinking i would never live here again friends that i had grown up with had moved away the city itself was completely new to me i was starting over in really all kinds of ways and was open to new things even a career change but never in a million years had i thought about starting my own business and especially not a non-profit i founded love in spoonfuls because i really just believe that when you can solve a problem you should at least try and here i believe that access to healthy food is a basic human right i also think that with so many unsolvable problems in the world wasting food isn't one of them so the space between those two ideas is really what love and spoonfuls addresses we work to be creative and thoughtful and effective in our response to the unique challenges of food rescue and food insecurity in hebrew we call this ideal tikun alam which essentially means to repair the world in this case we take fresh healthy and perishable food that would otherwise be tossed and upcycle it into the social service stream why do we do this each year about 40 percent of all food that's produced in the united states and that's roughly 63 million tons of food is wasted and around the world that's about a third of our global food supply so 11 spoonfuls began truly as a business meant to be helpful and i'm incredibly proud of what it's become really the team that's helped to build it being in business is usually about your customer your end user and in that way it's no different for us but what's included here even prioritized is our culture who we are our guts so for us it's not just what we're doing but it's how we're doing it and i think that that's about just trying to create a better system and a better way of doing things creating value many years ago totally inspired by one of our board members we created a community bill of rights for our team and then one for our partners the ability to do that really is what makes love and spoonfuls the kind of company it's become so i'm a ceo who also happens to be the founder and my journey in both roles over the last few years has been largely focused on the how of doing things much less on the what it is that we do so now more than ever the world really demands the highest standard of that how and it's so important to us at spoonfuls to keep the folks that we're serving and our employees right at the forefront rather than just seeing this work as another day in business you know business as usual we pay a living wage offer access to wellness both physical and mental a work-life balance well maybe that was pre-covered we supported our front line with an in-office food market hazard pay mental health days all to say trying to riff on being the change that you want to see in the world you can't really give away what you don't have you know for me i learned how to stay sober from folks who freely offered their experience and their example to me literally gave me who they were as examples of what i hoped to become and for my colleagues and i trying to inject some equity into the community really can't happen if we're not cultivating it internally so being able to celebrate 10 years developing and nurturing who we are as a company was something that we had been reflecting on and were really excited about and then 2020 kovid george floyd and the resurgence of the black lives matter movement so here we are literally standing hopefully in a mask at the intersection of two viruses that threaten life as we know it in terms of covid we've all been forced to navigate our days differently my wife now works exclusively from home until further notice i'm literally the only person that she sees at love and spoonfuls our offices are taped up and divided and marked with instructions that reinforce the limits on where and how to interact with each other our waiting list has basically doubled the need is greater than ever and the effects on our community and this country will still be here long after covet isn't our communities and businesses are struggling and reinventing themselves every few weeks it seems just to try and survive a day at a time and in many ways we might want life to just go back to business as usual to the way it was the way we remember it in early march but in terms of where and who we are as a nation as a national and even global community i hope that we never do this moment is relentless as it should be but it's overwhelming there's so much to be done so much that's overdue how do we even begin and as a white woman who comes from tremendous privilege beyond my color i'm asking myself where do i begin how do i stand up one of the very first things that an early sponsor told me almost 20 years ago now remains true today walk from where you stand and use what you have so the question for me from that moment has always been and even now is more important than ever where am i going what do i have and how do i use it so whether you've acknowledged it or not we're all faced with not just needing to be better but with the responsibility to actively participate in and advocate for if not directly work to create social justice to be actively anti-racist actively vocal that black lives don't just matter but the black lives need to be honored valued recognized and stood up for i think of my grandmother standing in vienna 70 years after she escaped hitler and sort of quietly pleading with history out loud saying no one stood up and i know that i'm not the only one with a history and a legacy like this i think we've all seen or i hope we've all seen the footage from lafayette park of rachel parsons at the beginning of june everyone has a way to stand up and sometimes it's literally just standing up or kneeling or whatever you can do but everyone all of us has tools and it's not a question of if we use them it's how and it's when and i really believe that it has to be now i don't have any extraordinary ability beyond what i can do as one of many but what i do have is a choice and i do have the ability not just as a founder but as a ceo to conduct business in a way that matches the collective principles and values and ideals of those around me to commit to doing what hasn't been done and to improve on what has the privilege and opportunities that i've had and that i continue to have are a direct result of not only my color but of my family's legacy which has afforded me life as an american and i consider myself a patriot i always have and to me that means and represents a responsibility to do more and once they were here my great-grandfather and his children my mema and my great uncle henry they spent their lives working to repay what they felt they owed for their immigration here to the united states to build our family on the american dream their gratitude was present in every choice that they ever made they never forgot how and why they came here had someone stood up back then in vienna or really anywhere there are families that would be bigger and for every time mima wondered why nobody stood up i promise her now that i will our neighbors those who we know those who we don't know but those of us who need us to be an ally to take a stand to make a better choice they need us to do it we are each other's keeper and it is time so thank you for coming to my actual ted talk