The Kathy Underhill Scholarship Award highlights exceptional work in the food access field with advocacy, policy, or community engagement through the lens of health equity. Kathy Underhill, Hunger Free Colorado’s founding CEO, is a nationally recognized leader and policy expert in solving hunger. Lindsey Loberg, the Co-Director of Boulder Food Rescue, is the award’s third recipient.
The award comes with a $1,000 scholarship for professional development related to the awardee’s career and work within food access. Lindsey was selected from a strong group of nominees. This year’s selection committee includes Hunger Free Colorado board members, community advocates, and the award namesake.
The 2022 Winner: Lindsey Loberg
Hayden Dansky, Boulder Food Rescue’s Executive Director and Lindsey’s nominator, said: “Lindsey has built upon a foundation of food distribution to share food and power. This has created space to cultivate leadership inherent within communities, and they have also leveraged this work to help coordinators of these programs develop language around their community organizing, which ultimately helps them have better access to employment opportunities, wages, and overall health and security.”
An excerpt from Hayden’s award nomination form reads:
Lindsey Loberg has worked as the program director of Boulder Food Rescue for six years. In their role, they have greatly expanded Boulder Food Rescue’s work to be more justice-focused through expanding the No Cost Grocery Program (NCGP), community-led distribution points of food access. They have conducted community-based participatory research on food access which has led to their published research on food access barriers, showing not just that barriers exist to accessing food but how they amplify one another. They have used their platform for BFR staff to better understand the experiences of community members and have used their voice to amplify the voices less likely to be heard in our community. They have worked to study and understand participatory programs and change BFR’s programs to be more inclusive, more participatory, and support the dignity of people within our community. They have also created a Participation Framework and have helped train other organizations to become more participatory and inclusive. Their work has led to BFR hosting 30 No Cost Grocery Programs, which serve thousands of people every year healthy food they wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Lindsey has also signed on to advocacy policies with the objective of supporting more people with food insecurity, helped create voter registration programs within BFR, and support outreach programs to better understand food access. This all shows that Lindsey has the purpose of working for justice and equity. Their work also has the characteristics of collaboration with other agencies and always being willing to share, learn, and create new ideas in the search for common welfare in the communities.
During Lindsey’s acceptance speech, they said, “I build my work on the idea that people always do what’s best for their own health and well-being, for their family’s health and well-being, and for the community’s health and well-being…there are always people in our communities who are looking out for others, making sure everybody is safe and that they have what they need.”
Learn more about past Kathy Underhill Scholarship Award Winners:
Roberto Meza, Emerald Garden Microgreens
Fatuma Emmad, Frontline Farming
Left to right: Marc Jacobson, CEO of Hunger Free Colorado; Hayden Dansky, Executive Director of Boulder Food Rescue, Roberto Meza, 2020 KUSA winner; Lindsey Loberg; Jana Henthorne, HFC Board member