SR Inc’s Community Service: Food For Free

Here at SR Inc, our central focus has always been and continues to be helping Member-Clients make progress towards and ultimately achieve global decarbonization. That being said, we are always striving to heighten our internal commitment to sustainability. And so, as of 2021, we have pledged to donate 1% of employee time annually to volunteer opportunities that contribute meaningfully to climate policy and environmental justice.

As our 2023 kick-off event, during the afternoon of February 7th, members of our team traveled over to the Biogen headquarters in Cambridge, MA to volunteer with the organization Food For Free. SR Inc Member-Client Biogen built a kitchen space in their Kendall Square headquarters exclusively for Food For Free’s use, a donation well aligned with their own ESG goals.

Food For Free is a non-profit organization focused on food rescue, providing meals to students, seniors, and other members of the larger Boston community experiencing food insecurity, all with food that otherwise would have gone to waste. Food For Free runs a number of different volunteer programs, and we elected to participate in their Heat-n-Eats program, which creates fully balanced, individually portioned meals from food rescued from local university, corporate, and hospital dining halls.

Throughout our two-hour shift, our team broke apart frozen proteins, starches, and vegetables, packed each component into individual meal containers, and sealed, labeled, and packed each one. From our founder and CEO Jim Boyle to our newest SR Inc team member Sebastian Weir on only his third day with us, we each learned new skills around food preparation and did our best to maximize our contribution. And we are happy to share that, by the end of our shift, we packed a total of 150 meals, all of which will go to members of our own community who are struggling to meet their food needs.  

After the service event, Julia Rothfield, a Senior Analyst at SR Inc, reflected, “It’s a fantastic opportunity for our team, which works deeply in large-scale topics like energy and emissions with Member-Clients, to take the time to be of service to people and the environment on this more intimate scale.”

We encourage anyone interested in volunteering as a group or individual to learn more about their programs on their website, and sincerely look forward to volunteering with Food For Free more in the future. A great year of volunteer events is to come!

As an Analyst at SR Inc, Casey supports Member-Clients with outsourced program assistance and creates original research to help clients drive industry best practice in areas ranging from ESG governance structures, ESG reporting, and innovative renewable energy procurements.

Prior to working at SR Inc, Casey served as an AmeriCorps VISTA with Hawai‘i Green Growth Local2030 Hub, convening and collaborating with over 70 diverse partners across the Ala Wai watershed on sustainability and resiliency initiatives. This work involved cultivating individual relationships with community, government, and business partners, and driving forward the creation of a comprehensive project assessment tool rooted in indigenous knowledge systems and design economics. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Boston College, during which time she also interned with Brookline-based organization Boyer Sudduth Environmental Consultants, providing small business clients with sustainability best practice research, as well as exposure through a number of published blog articles. Casey has also held certification as a LEED Green Associate through the US Green Building Council since 2019.