Alumni Spotlight: Falcons Returning to the Nest

Aidan Reilly, The FarmLink Project, and What It Means to Be a Falcon

Some lessons take years to show their full shape. This week, one came home.

Aidan Reilly, a St. Matthew’s alum and co-founder of The FarmLink Project with fellow Falcon James Kanoff, visited campus on Friday and returned Tuesday to sit with Mrs. Wilson’s Service Leadership class. Before he arrived, our 7th grade students watched Abundance, the documentary that traces FarmLink from its first days to the present. When Aidan walked in, they were ready.

FarmLink’s mission is simple to say and hard to do: to “connect farms with surplus food to communities facing hunger.” The project began six years ago, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, when farms were destroying crops they could not sell while food bank lines stretched for blocks. But as Aidan told our students, the pandemic didn’t create that problem. The isolation and focus of quarantine made it impossible to ignore. Hunger and waste existed side by side long before 2020, and they still do. FarmLink exists because a group of young people saw that gap and decided it was theirs to help close.

For 25 minutes, our students gave him what he called “the best questions [he has] ever received from middle schoolers.” What was the hardest part of starting FarmLink? Where did you go to college? Did you ever want to quit? That last one is the question of someone who understands that service is not a single act of goodwill. It is a commitment you keep choosing, especially when it gets hard.

Where does that kind of commitment come from? Aidan’s answer pointed back here. He spoke about his conversations with his former teachers, and how the words he heard in those classrooms still shape the work he does today. At St. Matthew’s, service is not extracurricular. It is woven into Chapel, into the classroom, into the daily practice of noticing who is in need and asking what we owe one another. Aidan learned that at St. Matthew’s, and again at Loyola. Now he is living it at scale.

For the adults who knew him as a student, the visit felt like a circle closing. Some of us remember Aidan as Gaston in the 2013 production of Beauty and the Beast, Jr. We remember the kid who took the stage with confidence. Now we watch the young man who takes on a problem that plagues our society, determined to solve it, in his words, “even just a little bit.”

Being a Falcon doesn’t mean fixing everything. It means seeing what’s in front of you and doing your part, faithfully, even when no one is watching. This week, our 7th grade students saw what that looks like when someone carries it out into the great wide world.

The lesson is the same one we teach every day. Aidan just showed them where it leads.

Once a Falcon, always a Falcon. St. Matthew’s loves welcoming our alumni back to the nest. When will you come back to campus? Reach out to our Alumni Office at alumni@stmatthewsschool.com or rmacias@stmatthewsschool.com to plan your visit or share your story!