FI G HTI N G H U N G E R
A SHLEY STA NLEY ’97 Founder and CEO | Spoonfuls | Newton, MA
Her nonprofit has kept over 30 million pounds of food out of landfills.
PHOTO BY WEBB CHAPPELL
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SHLEY STANLEY, a standout athlete during her time at Rivers, thought she was headed for a life in sports. “I played Division I soccer on a scholarship after having played three varsity sports at Rivers, including soccer, which I started in the sixth grade at Dana Hall before transferring,” she says. But in her sophomore year at the University of Rhode Island, a career-ending injury diverted that dream. Forced to rethink her future, she turned to the familiar. Her grandfather had been a vice president at Bloomingdale’s, and Stanley went to work opening stores for Ralph Lauren. “I loved it, but it wasn’t feeding me—no pun intended,” she says. Stanley took a step back and thought about what to do next. One day she was eating lunch in a suburban Boston restaurant. “There were only two of us, and there was so much food,” she recalls. Looking around, she realized that every table was similarly laden. “There was a little bit of electricity in my mind about it,” she says. “I woke up for days thinking we couldn’t be the only people in the only restaurant in the only town with not just enough, but with so much too much.” In December 2009, Stanley began picking up surplus food at Boston-area grocery stores and delivering it to the Pine Street Inn, a shelter downtown. But she believed
she could do more. By 2010, she had launched the Spoonfuls (then known as Lovin’ Spoonfuls) food recovery and redistribution service, with a single food recovery route in Greater Boston. Today, a fleet of trucks delivers excess food from grocery stores, wholesalers, and farms to community organizations across Massachusetts that serve people facing food insecurity. Spoonfuls is the largest food recovery operation of its kind in New England. To date, the nonprofit has kept over 30 million pounds of good food out of landfills—enough for more than 24 million meals. Stanley has represented Spoonfuls at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in 2022, and she has spoken about her work as a guest lecturer at Harvard, MIT, Babson, and elsewhere. She aims to expand Spoonfuls beyond Massachusetts. One day, she hopes, food recovery will be as widely available as recycling is today. Reflecting back on her years at Rivers, Stanley says, “High school is a time to think about the future and think of who and what you might want to be out in the world. The fundamentals of sport have always been my North Star, and being a three-season athlete at Rivers certainly cemented that for me.”
Fall 2024 | RIPARIAN 33