THE ALARM WENT off early on a Friday morning, the diminishing beeps of the 'radar' setting echoing in Caroline Ricksen's head.
As a sophomore coxswain on the Stanford women's rowing team, Ricksen is used to waking up early. But 3 a.m.?
"There was so much excitement," Ricksen said. "I didn't even press snooze."
She grabbed some clothes, her laptop and charger, and stepped into her Audi to pick up Blake Sharp, a junior on Stanford's beach volleyball team. Sharp, also from Orinda, California, got an extra 15 minutes of sleep. Her alarm didn't go off until 3:15.
They turned north and began a 4 ½ hour drive to oversee a delivery of potatoes to a food bank near the Oregon border.
Each is a volunteer for FarmLink, a non-profit organization founded and run by more than 50 college students to fill a huge need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alarmed that farmers have been forced to dispose of surplus crops and dairy products because contracts and distribution streams have dried up, while food banks are overrun and largely empty, Stanford sophomore James Kanoff co-founded FarmLink with friends from Brown University with the intention of bridging that gap. Their mission is to find and deliver otherwise-wasted crops to the food banks.
So far, FarmLink has delivered 570,000 pounds of food and provided $35,000 of relief to farmers and truck drivers.
Alex Tsai, a junior on the Stanford women's lacrosse team, was among the first to join the movement. Tsai and Kanoff are Mayfield Fellows, described on its Web site as "an immersive entrepreneurship work/study program that trains 12 Stanford undergraduate and co-term students to become leaders in tech." It is administered through the Stanford Technology Ventures program.
"Mayfield really teaches entrepreneurial thinking as a mindset," Tsai said from her home in La Jolla, north of San Diego. "Running a nonprofit like this one involves a lot of the same thinking that it does to scale a tech startup. It's been a lot of hands-on learning, and a test of adaptability and optimism."
Tsai, a computer science major, has followed a mantra she learned from management science and engineering professor Tina Seelig: "The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity."
Tsai's role with FarmLink has evolved into corporate fundraising efforts. Besides taking online classes and playing lacrosse with her brothers in the backyard, "whenever I have spare minute, it's pretty much spent on FarmLink," she said.
Alex Tsai. Photo by Bob Drebin/ISIphotos.com.
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RICKSEN CAME ON board through a friendship with Kanoff. She reached out to him and another Stanford sophomore, Stella Delp, who also was part of the core organizing group.
"I heard about what they were doing and it was inspiring," Ricksen said. "I asked what I could do to help support them."
Ricksen, who has declared symbolic systems as her major, is part of the deals team. Once there is a match, she works to finalize logistics while communicating with farm and food bank to make sure the delivery runs smoothly.
Sharp became involved through her friendship with Tsai. It came up during a conversation.
"People don't have access to food around the country and yet you have this disconnect between farmers who are plowing food back into the ground," Sharp said. "It was baffling to me. I knew this was something I wanted to be part of."
Sharp, a computer science major, is on the food banks team, reaching out to see if they would like and can handle the shipments.
"I've been trying to find food banks that are under-resourced," Sharp said. "I've especially been looking at maps of Native American reservations across the country and trying to find food banks closest to them."
Sharp connected a delivery of 42,500 pounds of potatoes from Desert Ridge Produce in Moses Lake, Washington, to the Siskiyou Community Food Bank in Yreka, close to the Karuk people headquartered in Happy Camp, and the Modoc of central southern Oregon.
When Kanoff, who is based in Southern California, expressed an interest in having a FarmLink volunteer on-site, Ricksen and Sharp were eager to be there. That's how they found themselves on Interstate 5 at sunrise.
Listening to Train, Taylor Swift, and Jack Johnson, Ricksen and Sharp put the Central Valley in the rearview mirror. They skirted the edges of Lake Shasta, past Castle Crags and through the canyons near Dunsmuir before emerging to a breathtaking view of Mt. Shasta that filled their windshield.
"Unreal," Sharp said. "I'd never been to Mt. Shasta."
Blake Sharp. Photo by Caroline Ricksen.
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THEY ARRIVED IN a large parking lot at Yreka Bowl, where they were met by Laura Leach, executive director of the Siskiyou food bank. Soon after, the truck rolled in.
Leach organized pickups from the community – including tribes, health-care workers, and Feed the Need, a nonprofit that hand delivers food to seniors along the Klamath River.
After hours of unloading potatoes off the truck and into cars and trucks, only four of the 17 pallets remained. Those would be delivered to a food bank in Oregon.
Leach thanked Ricksen and Sharp for their dedication and kindness. Willie Thompson, the food bank board president, told the Siskiyou Daily News, "A lot of people will have a good use for this. And they are really good quality."
By talking to those they met, Sharp learned how valuable this delivery would be.
"They were so grateful," Sharp said.
On the drive home, they connected on Zoom to FarmLink to report on the delivery.
"Given the crisis that we're in, it's overwhelming at times," Tsai said of the task at hand. "But when things feel insurmountable, we embrace the challenge and also try to remember why we're doing it in the first place, which is to make a difference in a single person's life and then go from there."
Tsai, Ricksen, and Sharp agree that it's incredibly special that a bunch of college students are finding a way to make a huge impact.
"I want to emphasize how honored and lucky I am to be a part of this," Ricksen said. "It's been inspiring to see all of these students working hard to grow something like this. I'm looking forward to see what happens in the future."
Other than for food, Ricksen and Sharp didn't stop on the way back to the Bay Area. Ricksen dropped Sharp off before finally returning home, exhausted, yet exhilarated.
"Honestly," Ricksen said. "It was an amazing and incredible day."
Caroline Ricksen celebrates a job well done with a soda, with Mt. Shasta in the background. Photo by Blake Sharp.