Locals-only quiz: From where do you know Julianne Carone? Park City Rotary? Relay for Life? Youth Sports Alliance and JANS Winter Welcome? Your PTO or School Council? Or as the owner of Main Street favorite Rocky Mountain Christmas until it closed in 2016? Now, one of Park City's most peripatetic activists has yet another mission: assuring food from our homes and restaurants goes to those in need instead of the dumpster.
"I had no idea of the impact of food waste," Julianne says of discovering WasteLess Solutions last year, where she serves as Summit County Area Director. “I immediately became 'that person,' asking everyone what they did with their food waste!"
After frequent childhood moves, Julianne arrived here in the 90s, getting to know Park City as a weekend bookkeeper at a local bar. "It was easy to meet people and feel included; the first place I ever felt at home," she smiles. Settling here for good with her husband in 2005, she took over Rocky Mountain Christmas in 2006 and "I wasn't ready to retire," when it closed ten years later. She encountered WasteLess while serving as Park City Rotary's Community Service Director.
Since 2018, WasteLess volunteers “rescue” otherwise wasted food for pantries and emergency shelters, each with different acceptance criteria. Restaurants and food producers are significant WasteLess contributors, but Julianne says households can help, too. "Almost 40 percent of wasted food comes from consumers overbuying or mistakenly thinking food has expired. It ends up in our landfill," she laments.
Always on the alert for service opportunities, Julianne finds them in unexpected places: she's been an International Luge Official for 21 years, "a unique volunteer experience," she enthuses. "Park City has one of only three world competition tracks in North America."
"I feel I am making a direct impact on people," she says of her decades of local involvement. "I know I am helping the environment and the community."