Bringing Bounty to Oregon Prisons

Nutrition INSIDE enjoyed a bountiful summer. The emerging nonprofit expanded its efforts to reroute surplus food from farms, grocery stores, and food recovery groups to Oregon’s correctional facilities.

“Thanks to our partnership with Salem Harvest, we processed 2,000 pounds of peaches in a week,” says Aidan O’Connor BA ’23, Nutrition INSIDE’s founding director. “Some of these people haven’t had peaches in years.”

The Portland-based nonprofit, which launched in November 2024, has celebrated a remarkable number of milestones in its short time in operation. In summer 2025, the team reached its goal of sending food to all six state prisons in Oregon, partnering with 11 businesses including Whole Foods Market, the Organically Grown Company, and Dave’s Killer Bread. Volunteers have moved upwards of 43,000 pounds of food in total, which translates to around 3,000 pounds of food per week. Also over the summer, O’Connor and other Nutrition INSIDE leaders—most of whom are L&C students or recent alumni—presented to the head of food service at the Department of Corrections, who was enthusiastically on board with the organization’s mission.

The hard work has paid off. The Portland-based nonprofit Growing Gardens, which oversaw the organization in a six-month pilot, recently acquired Nutrition INSIDE in a two-year deal, ensuring that the team can continue to execute its mission in the long term—bridging the gap between surplus food and the immediate needs of correctional facilities in order to provide nutritious meals to those whose health is often neglected.

O’Connor traces the origins of Nutrition INSIDE back to his time as an environmental studies major at Lewis & Clark, where he enrolled in Critical Perspectives on Development, taught by Associate Professor of Sociology Maryann Bylander. “The class opened me up to a new way of looking at nonprofits, NGOs, and development work at large,” he says.

In his first year after graduation, through the support of the Farmlink Project, a food waste reduction organization, O’Connor was able to spend 10 paid weeks volunteering with Growing Gardens’ Lettuce Grow, a program that provides hands-on gardening instruction to incarcerated individuals. Alongside fellow volunteer and classmate Beau Staun-List BA ’25, O’Connor saw firsthand the extent of malnutrition among those behind bars. Data has shown that U.S. inmates are six times more likely to suffer malnourishment or contract a foodborne illness than the general population, and a staggering 91 percent report experiencing food insecurity after their release.

O’Connor, Staun-List, and 12 other L&C students and alumni came together in 2024 to begin work on a creative solution for two rising, intertwined problems: insufficient food quality affecting the state’s prison population and large amounts of food waste within the state’s overall food systems. From here, it was about “connecting the dots between waste and need, between harm and care,” says O’Connor.

Several team members built their knowledge of the U.S. carceral system through Professor of History Reiko Hillyer’s Inside-Out classes, which bring together students and incarcerated individuals at the nearby Columbia River Correctional Institution for a critical reexamination of criminal justice.

Founding members from L&C continue to guide the organization as leaders of Nutrition INSIDE’s six teams (see box above). “We’re able to do this work because of the students and alumni who come together every week and volunteer their time,” O’Connor says. “None of our accomplishments would be possible without this level of commitment. It’s such a special part of how we’re able to progress.”

—Zoey Keepper BA ’26 contributed reporting to this story.