Virginia Rodriguez will tell you that food was never just food growing up. Raised in Los Angeles by first-generation college graduates whose own parents had fled as refugees, Virginia grew up in a household where scarcity was a living memory and nothing on the plate was taken for granted. Her family kept chickens, tended a vegetable garden, and harvested fruit trees. And yet, her father would buy a meal for anyone who needed one. Food, in her home, was both something to be protected and something to be shared. Those two core values have never left her.
Volunteering since she was young, she has carried that tradition forward with her daughter, bringing her along to beach cleanups, soup kitchens, and more from an early age. Giving back through connection, for Virginia, is not an occasional impulse. It is simply how she moves through the world.
Virginia found ProduceGood the way the best things tend to happen: through a story that resonated and a friend who made it sound like fun. She heard Executive Director Alex White speak about how ProduceGood was founded, and the mission clicked immediately. Then a friend raved about her Jimbo's market gleaning shifts, and Virginia signed up to join her. One shift was all it took. "Volunteering for ProduceGood is such a good way to give back to the community," she says, "while meeting amazing people who care, and mostly working outside. It's fulfilling in so many ways."
These days, Virginia serves as a Volunteer Ambassador, which means she gets to do one of her favorite things: talk about ProduceGood to anyone who will listen. Through outreach events and by working alongside the advocacy committee, she brings the mission to life for people who have never heard of food recovery. Her favorite audiences? Kids. She had the privilege of speaking to children at the Boys and Girls Club and the local library, and what she found delighted her. Every one of them knew how to compost and loved eating fruits and vegetables. When she explained that there was one more step they could take before composting, sharing excess food with neighbors who needed it, they lit up. "It was wonderful to see their eagerness to participate," she says, "and how easily they embrace the logic of our mission."
Virginia is exactly the kind of voice ProduceGood's new Storytellers program was made for: someone who embodies personal passion and bountiful humor, and a generous spirit, and whose wish for the world is, in her own words, to end poverty. "Don't laugh," she says, "I've never been in a beauty pageant." We're not laughing. We're inspired.
Oh, and if she were a fruit or vegetable? A prickly pear. "I could grow and thrive in the harshest conditions and still be sweet." Virginia, we couldn't agree more.
From left: Janey Mason, Kenzie Anderson (staff), Kristin King (staff), Alex White (staff), Virginia Rodriguez, Susan Hoffman, Katie Melendez (staff), and Peter Colwell.
