Meet Carla, Our New Executive Director!

By Carla Pellegrini, Executive Director

Hi there! My name is Carla Pellegrini and I am the new Executive Director at Food Stash Foundation. I started at Food Stash on July 15 and have spent my first few days learning firsthand how we operate and have such an incredible impact on families and individuals across Vancouver. With the team, I drove around to many of our supplier partners rescuing food, distributed it to several of our charity partners and also sorted it back at the warehouse for our food box programs. I have spent time individually with our team members, a few of our board members, David, our Founder, and many of our longstanding volunteers and donors. I am grateful to have this time to learn and observe how the organization operates, and am even more grateful to have been able to overlap with Julia for these last two weeks. She has stewarded the organization to an incredible place and I am looking forward to continuing on her legacy in the next stages of Food Stash’s growth.

By way of background, I come to Food Stash with over ten years of experience in non-profit and for-profit community development, social finance and operations management. I am passionate about facilitating community-driven positive impact with a systems-level lens and believe that Food Stash's two fold mission of tackling food waste and food insecurity in Vancouver is central to solving some of our community's core challenges. Prior to joining Food Stash, I worked for over four years to help establish and grow New Market Funds, a B Corp certified impact investing firm in Vancouver. As the Director of Partnerships and Operations, I helped scale the organization from no staff to 15, from one impact fund to four, and from $25M AUM to $65M AUM, all while creating and nurturing company culture and a community-centred approach to social impact. I raised funding and investments valued at over $8.5M and supported efforts that financed over $25M to non-profits, charities and co-operatives across Canada.

Before working at New Market Funds, I launched and grew the Vancouver office for Sonder, a hospitality tech start-up. Prior to moving to Canada, I worked abroad with One Acre Fund in Kenya where we used 1,100 trucks to, in a span of just 45 days, cover 90,000km to deliver 10,000 metric tons of seed and fertilizer to the doorstep of nearly 150,000 smallholder farmers each year. Before joining One Acre Fund, I obtained my Masters in Public Administration from Columbia University in New York, served in the US Peace Corps in Nicaragua and received my Bachelors of Arts from Boston College. I’m excited to leverage my previous experiences across sectors here at Food Stash. 

I have joined Food Stash at the perfect time. Our team is experienced, passionate and resilient; our mission and impact are clear and powerful; we are in a strong position to grow; and we have a wonderful new warehouse on W 2nd Avenue. The ideas are already flowing for how we can continue to best utilize these assets to grow and serve even more individuals and families across Vancouver while tackling systemic food waste challenges. I look forward to updating you on our progress and am grateful for your continued support. Please do not hesitate to reach out at any time with questions, concerns or feedback. I look forward to connecting with you!