When Eliza Blank transitioned from the fast-paced, buttoned-up startup world to the more chaotic and tumultuous one of nonprofit, the transition wasn’t as difficult as one might think.

Blank previously founded The Sill, a 13-year-old company dedicated to the logistics of shipping flimsy plants, wobbly trees and delicate vases to people all over the country. The company raised more than $25 million before she left in 2024. In late October, she announced she is the chief executive of Koreatown-based Farmlink Project, a national nonprofit tackling food insecurity in America.

On its head, The Sill and The Farmlink Project are pretty similar. Both are dedicated to quickly moving plants – from tender rooted vines to dense, rolling apples – to people before they go to waste.

“What attracted me to Farmlink is that this group thinks like a startup. These are a bunch of young people coming in from outside asking really hard questions like, ‘Why has this always been this way?’” Blank said. “’How can you take these antiquated industries and disrupt them? What resources do we have today that we didn’t have 10 years ago or 50 years ago when the food banking system started to evolve?’”

In a world where e-commerce giants have perfected the art of last-mile delivery of everyday goods, providing hundreds of pounds of produce to food-insecure households is still difficult in the U.S. The problem becomes worse as the longest ever government shutdown is forcing delays in food stamp benefits, which will affect 41.7 million people – roughly 12% of the U.S. – who rely on federal SNAP food assistance.

Right now, organizations like Farmlink are scrambling to fill the gaps by bringing extra food from farmers to food banks. But Farmlink is taking it a step further by developing a long-term technology strategy to make the process easier in the future.

“Ultimately,” Blank said, “what’s the purpose of new technology if it’s not going to allow you to do more with less?”

The tech debt

When Aidan Reilly started what would become The Farmlink Project in 2020, he was a junior in college sent back to his hometown of Los Angeles during the throes of the pandemic and hoping to volunteer at a local food bank. The endeavor quickly spiraled into him and his friends cold-calling farmers and driving U-Hauls across the 405 Freeway to pick up and distribute food to food banks.

They called themselves Deal Team Six. Within three weeks, the group moved a million pounds of food.

“It’s a highly manual process at the moment. Imagine trying to run any kind of for-profit or retail supply chain where you don’t know what your market is when you’re supplying whatever you’re trying to sell and you have 24 to 48 hours of expiring product that you’ve got to figure out how to get to market,” Reilly said. “That doesn’t lead to a very efficient supply chain and that can probably make it more expensive.”

Nonprofits like Farmlink are trying to take advantage of the tech innovation happening in their backyards. Though the tech sector is considered a bastion of American innovation and a key driver of the country’s economic health, penetration in critical industries has been rather slow. Cost, lack of intuitiveness with current workflows and unproven efficacy have made it difficult for technology dedicated to education, health care and agriculture to stick.

Nonprofits, like other critical industries, have long been too bogged down by tight budgets and rapidly approaching deadlines to focus on budgeting for and integrating new technology into their workflows.

“This charitable food system, aside from a few outliers, largely hasn’t changed that much since the first food bank in the ’60s,” Reilly said. “Our long-term job – through example, through partnership, and through bringing in innovation into this space – is to help evolve it.”

In order to justify the billions of dollars that flow through limited partners into the startup sector, budding companies need to have a defensible proposal that protects its growth from competitors, whether it be a first-to-the-market reputation, a robust data set or proprietary technology.

“Research is showing that venture capital and folks in the tech world are always looking for moonshots or unicorns, basically heavy disruptors that are more than economic engines, but, if you will, culturally legacy makers,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor at the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “As a result, that kind of investment economy around tech related companies does not fit the range of opportunities to create businesses, let alone businesses that are good for society.”

Nonetheless, nonprofits are working on their own ways to use existing technology to make operations faster and less expensive. Thorn, an El Segundo-based nonprofit focused on battling the solicitation and distribution of child abuse materials online, build tools for online platforms that allow children to safely surf the web. Better Angeles, led by technology entrepreneur Adam Miller, is tackling the antiquated and jumbled systems that track resources in L.A.

“The patchwork of disconnected systems and obsolete tools that are used to serve the unhoused population also contributes to the failure of our community to help individuals who are homeless get into temporary shelter,” Better Angeles’ website states. “On any given night, there are many empty shelter beds across the county. That’s because there is no centralized shelter network or even a comprehensive directory of shelters and no automated way for a case manager or client to reserve a bed.”

Thinking ahead

The Farmlink Project is grappling with its own reality. Receiving agencies that work with Farmlink can be anything from a food bank to a church basement. Some are situated in rural areas that use a box of index cards and a landline to track inventory. Some have more fridges than others to accommodate fresh food, or less shelves than neighboring agencies for preserved items. Some have too much of one food and not enough of another.

“We’ve seen different organizations try and get the receiving agents to become more high-tech,” Blank said. “And that’s unlikely to happen at scale. You actually need to meet them where they are.”

The Farmlink Project is embarking on its own technology proposal, one that doesn’t force technology on either the receiving agencies or the farmers. “They’ve got enough to worry about, to be honest,” Reilly said.

The organization is slowly working to develop a logistics platform that can quickly put the right food in the right hands.

“Are we at a disadvantage being a nonprofit?” Reilly said. “In the startup space, if you’re not pretty much on the leading edge of whatever available technology to develop, then good luck getting funded. We actually have the space as a nonprofit to kind of work with what is immediately available and possible and simple.”