StuCo connects with Collier Brothers & The FarmLink Project

The Hopkins Student Council (StuCo) has begun their annual fundraising effort for the Connecticut Food Bank, and this year they're doing things a bit differently. As students are unable to fundraise outside grocery stores in their towns, they have adapted the program to gather donations online. They have also initiated a campaign to educate the Hopkins community about food insecurity, and the thousands of families in Connecticut who struggle to put healthy food on the table. As part of that effort, on Thursday, Nov. 19, StuCo arranged a Zoom call with alumni brothers Ben '17 and Will '16 Collier, co-founders of the FarmLink Project, a non-profit that distributes food from farms to food banks around the country. Joining the call with 25 students and faculty, the brothers explained how they, along with a small group of college friends, started the organization last spring, and how it has grown exponentially over the last eight months. 

In a Q&A session, students asked Ben and Will what it was like to start a non-profit, how they got the attention of none other than Gordon Ramsey, and how their organization developed the teams within their group to organize tasks and responsibilities as they grew. Watch the full zoom presentation below. 

More about The Farmlink Project: The Farmlink Project started after identifying a key problem at the start of the pandemic: farms were throwing out lots of food they would normally sell to restaurants. This nonprofit stepped in to provide a solution by connecting farms with food banks around the country to repurpose surplus food. They've since been featured on NBC, in the Washington Post, and in the New York Times for their work transporting food that would normally get thrown out by farms to food banks. The Farmlink Project has also collaborated with companies like Chipotle and Uber Freight as well as celebrities like Gordon Ramsey to deliver millions of pounds of food and raise awareness for food insecurity in the US. 

Learn more about the FarmLink Project on their website. 


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Hopkins is a private middle school and high school for grades 7-12. Located on a campus overlooking New Haven, CT, the School takes pride in its intellectually curious students as well as its dedicated faculty and staff.