Meet New Sun Rising Board Member Josh Weiland

New Sun Rising board members have a significant impact on how our organization shows up in community development throughout Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Their passion about making a difference and contributing to the growth of our region helps drive our work. 

One of our newer board members, Josh Weiland, is the Chief Operating Officer at 412 Food Rescue. His work touches on operations, finance, coalition-building, and revenue. Before his current role, he spent years in high-pressure Pittsburgh restaurant kitchens, including one that earned a James Beard nomination.

“That kitchen background turned out to be better preparation for food rescue work than I expected; both jobs come down to the same thing: get perishable resources where they need to go, fast, with a team that has to stay in sync even when everything’s on fire,” Weiland said. “Food systems and community impact have been the through-line of my career, and I’ve built a lot of coalition work along the way with groups like the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, Just Harvest, and United Way of Southwestern PA.”

What attracted him to New Sun Rising’s mission? Our capacity-building model.

“Grassroots organizations doing genuinely important work don’t usually fail because the idea was bad. They stall because nobody built them the operational backbone to keep going. I know that problem well because much of my job at 412 Food Rescue is building exactly that kind of backbone.”

While on the board for NSR, he hopes to help the organization beyond any one project or grant cycle.

“I want NSR to help prove, in a way that’s hard to argue with, that sustainability and community resilience aren’t just nice values. They’re the smart bet, the choice that actually builds a future worth having. Every project NSR sponsors is a little more evidence for that case, and I’d like to help make it louder.”

Since serving on the board, what’s surprised him the most about New Sun Rising is how many projects are under the organization’s umbrella.

“Coming from a single-organization role, I expected to find a handful of related initiatives. Instead, I found a grassroots ecosystem in Pittsburgh that’s bigger and more interconnected than I’d realized.

That’s changed how I see two things. First, it gave me a much broader view of this region: how many people are doing serious, high-impact work with almost no infrastructure to support them. Second, it gave me real respect for how much NSR has to bend and adapt to serve all of it well. A community garden needs something different than an arts collective, which needs something different than a food justice initiative. Holding all of that at once and doing it responsibly is a harder problem than it looks from the outside.”

Click here to learn about opportunities to support New Sun Rising and our mission.