2020 Bend Venture Conference: Down to the Wire

2020 Bend Venture Conference Speaker: Aidan Reilly

Co-Founder of The Farmlink Project

Down to the Wire: Saving and Redistributing Food Waste During a Pandemic & Beyond

The Farmlink Project is a not-for-profit grassroots movement that connects farms with food banks to feed thousands in need while supporting essential jobs. Co-founder Aidan Reilly is a rising senior at Brown University studying Political Science with a concentration in comparative politics. Born in Los Angeles, Aidan’s primary interests have largely centered around documentary filmmaking. As reflected in his past work covering the 2018 Nicaraguan Civil Crisis and the ongoing Syrian Refugee Crisis, Aidan has a passion for finding ways the everyday person can resonate with seemingly vast and unsolvable problems. This interest manifested at the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic with his co-creation of The FarmLink Project, an initiative aiming to motivate everyday Americans to fight both food waste and food insecurity in the United States.

Since its beginnings in April of 2020, Farmlink has grown from a small network of college students to a nationwide movement to fix the broken food system in the United States. In the last 6 months, the project has utilized the help of 200 full-time volunteers (average age of 21) to save 13 million pounds of produce from going to waste, and instead get it to communities in need across 40 states. In addition, the project has been able to pay nearly $1 million in wages to farmworkers. The ultimate goal of Farmlink is to democratize access to fresh produce to underserved communities for years to come.

2020 Bend Venture Conference Moderator: Megan Bolt

Founder of Raddr

Local entrepreneur and OSU-Cascades student, Megan Bolt is currently a Business Administration student at OSU-Cascades where she works as both the Student Outreach Coordinator for the Career Development Center and as a Student Consultant for the Innovation Co-Lab. When not studying, she is rock climbing, fishing, hiking, or working towards developing her own business, Raddr – a company that blends the passion for fishing with the desire for quality, fitting, and fun gear that aims to fit the needs of fishing women everywhere.