Our Team

Board of Directors

Maria Yap   Founder & Executive Director

Maria Yap is the founder and executive director of Peninsula Food Runners. Prior to Peninsula Food Runners, Maria devoted her time to her two children.  For several years, she was a health care advocate and a personal chef to her mother in law battling lung cancer. During this period, she dabbled in various diets.  All was much in line with her interest in nutrition, which she minored.  Her major was in Food Service Management.  After graduating from Tante Marie's Cooking school in San Francisco, she had a brief stint as a sous chef for Cuisine-in-Style in Burlingame.   Prior to motherhood, Maria was employed in Marketing Sales at Burroughs Wellcome  (which merge to become Glaxo Smith Kline), promoting well known drugs such as Retrovir for HIV, Zovirax for Herpes Viruses, and Wellbutrin for Depression to Specialists around the bay area.  Her native language is Malay and Cantonese but she is most fluent in English.   

Molly Rhine

Molly Rhine is the South Bay Outreach and Marketing Manager for Peninsula Food Runners and has been with Peninsula Food Runners since 2015.  Molly’s primary volunteer focus is always within her community. Prior to her current role, she is a ten year volunteer with Hospice of the Valley, as well as the Los Gatos Rowing Club, Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, local schools in the community, and her parish church, St. Mary’s of Los Gatos.  Molly is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies.  After many years in the corporate sector, she changed her direction to work on several social issues, such as food redistribution and hunger, which are of keen interest to her. Molly resides in Los Gatos with her husband, Greg, with whom she has 3 daughters.

Tod Hing

Tod Hing has over 15 years of computer development and consulting experience.  Before starting a consulting firm, he worked at Hewlett-Packard as a Senior Technical Web Consultant for 8 years.  Along with developing websites, mobile apps and web applications for fortune 500 companies, Tod is also a web consultant for Stanford University’s Biomedical department. Tod also developed ChowMatch, the technology used by Peninsula Food Runners to streamline the food recovery and distribution process. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. 

Jeffrey Lawrence

Jeffrey Lawrence has lived in the Bay area for 35 years. He is a an attorney who has specialized in plaintiffs' class action investigations and litigation, including consumer cases involving misrepresentations about food nutrition, for the past 20 years and was a federal prosecutor before that. Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food" focused Jeff's interest in nutrition. Those books and the exploding obesity crisis moved him to take an interest in food health and in particular, healthy eating among children and young adults.

Jeff has joined Peninsula Food runners in an effort to distribute otherwise wasted healthy foods to those in need and at the same time limit waste in the environment. Jeff lives on the peninsula with is family and enjoys the cultural and outdoor activities in Northern California.

Patti Van Der Burg

Patti grew up in Modesto, California, the 10th of 11 children. Patti's parents often led by example in helping others and so it brings her joy to do so as well. She received a BS in Mechanical Engineering at Cal Poly and worked in semiconductor capital equipment and medical devices for 10 years, before becoming a stay at home mom, with volunteering on the side. Patti's husband of 26 years, Erik, is a medical device entrepreneur. Their kids are 17 (high school) and 20 (University of Oregon). Living in Los Gatos, she is active in Rotary, racquetball, and reading. Patti also enjoys the opportunity to both reduce waste and feed the hungry at Peninsula Food Runners.

Staff

Hoai-An Truong

For over three years, Hoai-An (pronounced 'Why-Ann')  Truong has served as PFR Program Manager.  Every day, she coordinates volunteers to rescue surplus food and deliver it to organizations dedicated to feeding those in need.  What make Hoai-An tick?  Making meaningful contributions toward reducing food waste.  It’s one of the top 5 climate solutions to reducing and removing emissions from the atmosphere. By reducing food waste and diverting it from landfills, we can feed those in need AND reduce harmful greenhouse gases.

Advisory Board

Linda Levenson

Marc Yelnick

Marc is a retired attorney, who also studied business at the MBA level. Fighting the Climate Crisis has been playing a significant role in his thoughts and actions for the past two decades. During this period, he has been a frequent Crisis-focused speaker, advocate, and lobbyist in the Bay Area.  Marc currently serves as legal counsel to, and is a Director/Vice Chair of, Burlingame’s Citizens Environmental Council (CEC), is on the Board of Advisers of the New Roots Institute, and serves as an Electric Car Ambassador for Acterra. He has been an active runner for about a decade, thereby adding food insecurity-related ameliorative action to his environmental activism. Under Marc's leadership and organization, CEC members have picked up excess food from North Peninsula Trader Joe's locations every Thanksgiving and Christmas for delivery to emergency shelters, soup kitchens, low-income housing, etc. Marc regularly plays pickleball and has resumed international travel and attending art-house movies and rock concerts.