- I think that a lot of people are having an opportunity to peer into the life of a small business.

They just like you struggle with budgets.

This threw a giant wrench in any plan that we once had.

My name's Daniel Brown.

I'm one of the founders of Rust Belt Riders and we're located in the St. Clair superior neighborhood of Cleveland.

Rust Belt Riders provides businesses, organizations and individuals with food waste collections and composting services.

So we make sure that people have the ability to divert food from entering landfills.

We were on a pretty steady growth trajectory, which was nice.

At the beginning of this year we launched our home pickup service where we provide you with a clean compostable bag lined five gallon bucket and then once a week collect that bin, exchanging it for a clean empty one.

The COVID outbreak has pretty significantly impacted our business, we've been deemed an essential service.

However, we felt like the best thing that we could do to keep our community safe and have the best interest of our team in mind was actually to temporarily suspend services.

A lot of the offices that we are serving have been encouraging their staff to work from home.

So there's just frankly, not a ton of reason to go to those facilities.

A lot of the restaurants that we work with are doing takeout only.

For the residents that we serve, we know that with a lot of people cooking at home and eating at home, there's probably a lot of food waste that we're going to be picking up soon and this is, for a lot of people, an opportunity to sort of revisit that self reliance streak that a lot of people that we work with have.

It's beginning to sound like a broken record, right.

But small business is the foundation of every community.

I mean, I think when we look back on this, who were the businesses that were providing free meals to our community.

These people whose livelihood depends on the community that they're in, that they're part of and that they serve.

We can invest today in the kind of society and the kind of economy that we want.

And we can move that needle like in a really, really big way today, whether it's choosing to shop at a small, independently owned business or a chain, you're making a choice with your dollars, and if we want to see those types of businesses live and exist through this and come out stronger, how we spend our dollars today, I don't think has ever meant more.

The mission of Rust Belt Riders is unchanged.

We're still in this to feed people and not landfills.

Our food systems, just like our economic systems, just like a whole bunch of other systems are fragile things.

And I think that we're part of a community that's interested in building those kinds of systems that will make us more resilient and stronger and more agile the next time we face another crisis.