Never Let A Good Crisis Go to Waste

If the disaster in this bogus TV report (that we created for a tabletop training exercise) actually happened, would you have the resources and expertise to tackle it?

How can we obtain those resources for our organizations and at the same time have them do the double duty of serving to build the totality of our organization during all the times when our main focus is on another disaster, the daily disaster of hunger.

Wait! This is the Hunger into Health blog. Education and empowerment. The blog that never met a vegetable it didn’t like. What have I got to contribute in the specialized disaster world of tough looking men and women supping coffee and barking into sat phones as they tap on crush-proof laptops?

Especially since my main experience of natural disaster as a resident of Santa Barbara prior to 2017 was this: 

June Gloom. A time of year when the sunny every day climate goes away for a little while and everyone goes into a major depression.

But then in Dec 2017 that all changed. Hell came to Paradise – the Thomas Fire.

We’d had a few large-ish fires before, but nothing like this.

• Went on for a month and burned 440 sq miles.
• Largest CA wildfire in history at the time.
• 2 dead and over 2.2 billion in damages.
• Destroyed 1,063 structures
• 104, 607 residents forced to evacuate in SB and Ventura Counties.

And one of evacuating families was mine.  Here’s my daughter Mia ready to face the dangerous air quality. 

We figured the major inconvenience of evacuation was going to be the end of it. But then, fate, like Steve Jobs, threw ‘one more thing’…

Torrential rain met burned soil loosened from the fire and swept down the hillsides of Montecito.

• • 23 dead 
• 129 destroyed and 307 damaged residences
• Main 101 freeway closed for 12 days, requiring 260 mile detour to get to SB from Los Angeles.
• Sister food bank, Foodshare in Ventura resupplied our Carpinteria program.

Even Oprah was affected. But rest assured that Ellen’s Llama’s were evacuated.

That’s what we faced. My mantra in this post is that disaster brings great opportunity. We live in a world that is not big on preparation, but if something bad happens then large pots of money can potentially be coming your way and you need strategies to maximize this and make the best use of it.

We had a big windfall in 2008 with the crash, and we used the money to propel ourselves to the next level as an organization, and the same is true of the Thomas disaster.

Disasters, like everything else have their seasons and cycles that we have to be able to understand to benefit from and to avoid doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, which could alienate supporters at a time when they may be extra sensitive.

Here is the standard cycle of preparation.

Of course human nature and the human experience do not fit into this. So maybe we better consider this continuum as well…

You need to understand the deep emotions that are raised by disaster. If you hit the right notes at the right time, you are golden. Hit the wrong one and ouch.

The other thing to say is that there are two distinct arenas of disaster fundraising. The response phase and the preparation phase.

Readiness is a lot more interesting to people when there is a disaster fresh in their minds. There is an 18 to 24 month window to capitalize on it before memory submerges.

When there is no recent disaster in memory, you have to pitch it as building community resiliency and seeking funding from those foundations and others who prioritize this.

DISASTER FUNDRAISING

Let me explain how we raised funds in the aftermath of the disaster and how we built that into an ongoing platform for support.

The first thing we did was try to promote our existing disaster plan. We simplified it into an aspirational document – that therefore needed funding, because there were things on it which we hadn’t done yet.

We also produced TV ads that reminded people about our disaster credentials.

During the disaster, we discovered that our relationships with government and key emergency players were not sufficient to enable us to do our job. We needed to build these relationships and also make a statement of our leadership potential within the disaster environment.

 And so when you want to make friends, you have a party.

We held a major conference bringing together the broad spectrum of disaster professionals and NGOs.

It also included a sophisticated table-top training exercise organized by a disaster professional out of MIT. This helped us set out our stall as movers and shakers in this area.

Successful nonprofits and their Executives interact with the community as subject matter experts. Consequently, we spun a white paper with learnings out of the conference and so gave us an additional opportunity to put ourselves forward as conveners and leaders.

Nine months on from that conference, we are keeping the momentum going by launching into developing a disaster feeding plan for our service area.

In your own relationship with other disaster professionals in your area, you have an ace in the hole which will get you a seat at any of the tables you are being denied access to – a network of member agencies – who have real, daily relationships with you, not dusty old MOUs. You have boots on the ground all across the area. Add to this your network of sister food banks, as well as national support, and it puts you in a formidable position.

Your programs, your network and your community network are the perfect point for disaster preparedness training, like here with an emergency preparedness fair that we are involved in. Resiliency is a key message for us and that is something that binds food insecurity and disaster preparedness together as one message. It also plays well with community foundations and strategic-thinking donors.

Of course it is tough to be selling intangibles all the time, so it pays to have a physical product to make your point. Our disaster food box has the value proposition of ‘ buy one and low income family gets another one free.’

Again, this builds the resilency theme and interconnects it with a charitable activity – I can help others while helping my family. We don’t make a dime on these boxes, but the value in terms of seeking sponsorship and grants is far in excess of anything we could get in selling them. They also have a shelf life of 25 years. Who of us can say that?

I talked about disaster working double duty to strengthen our ongoing operations. One area that is key for us is that of Food Literacy.

 

Here we aligned it to community resiliency and seek disaster funding to do what we would want to do anyway.

The same approach underscores our desire to build a specialized cadre of disaster volunteers to help with new distributions (like when agencies can’t operate during a disaster).

The idea is that this will help us build up our existing volunteer structure with new training and new resources – and again, all in the name of disaster resiliency. Our first stage will be to use existing CERT trained volunteers.

Following on from this is a specific volunteer area that we needed to address, based on our Thomas Disaster experience – the lack of sufficient PIOs.

These days we seem to be living in an all-disaster all of the time type of world, so you can use these principles to deal with other community challenges that come up. Like the Federal Government workers furlough.

These short-term challenges allow you to keep building your message of the food bank feeding EVERYONE in time of disaster.

In summary, here is the secret formula that will lead you to increased support in the disaster sphere.

May all your disasters be small and have large silver linings.

Goodbye Fundraising, Hello Resource Development

The Fundraising Tree of Many Hands

We are nearing the financial year end for many nonprofit organizations, and maybe things are going to work out fine and you will make budget.  Perhaps you will even produce one of those modest nonprofit surpluses that will make everyone feel good, with being so much that it would raise any eyebrows in the community. It is unlikely to be enough to enable you to truly reinvest in your mission at the level necessary.

Maybe, though, you are going to have a deficit this year. Is it a one-off freak event or do you sense a gradual softening of your fundraising?

In the world of food banking and emergency food provision we rode a wave of recession-based fundraising from 2008 to 2012 that was based on general recognition that doubling down on core services was a necessity that had to take priority over funding the opera or saving the snowy plovers.

Line Dancing Without The Stars

Those days are over. The problem is that the recovery is job-lite, and a growing number of the people who access our services are food insecure families with at least one breadwinner trying to piece together a living from a handful of part-time, low-pay, no-benefit jobs.

Nevertheless, many donors have become bored with the recession, and they want to move on. Now, they could be whistling opera arias while they feed the snowy plovers, rather than tapping their toe to a Woody Guthrie number and making sure that no American goes hungry. Many foundations have already moved on from a posture of feeling obligated to focus their resources on ‘urgent needs’ of a recession.

Snowy: Gimme all your money, honey.

I have touched on the challenges of the current fundraising environment in this column before, typically by encouraging you to ‘sell a new bill of goods’ to your donors (such as nutrition and food literacy; or food banks as preventive health institutions; or as community development engines). These newer ‘cure not band aid’ activities are designed to work symbiotically with the previous singular focus of hunger relief.

However, in this post, I want to encourage you to consider a more permanent shift in how you approach the entirety of your fundraising and development.

The Development Team (Self-Portrait)

Walk down the hall to look at your fundraising person or staff or department. However many, or how wonderful they are, they are NOT going to be able to succeed in providing the level of funding truly needed for you to succeed at your stated mission.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they cannot do it alone.

It requires everyone on the payroll and also everyone with links to your organization to have a ‘resource acquisition’ mentality, which is something different from simple ‘fundraising,’ and I hope to make this distinction clear.

When nonprofit leaders swap notes about fundraising, we usually gravitate to chit-chat about direct mail vs. events vs. online vs. this or that. We get hung up on the tactical tools rather than focusing on the types of shift in strategic approach that will enable us to succeed.

The good news is this strategic approach requires you to focus heavily on only two things:

1. Building and maintaining diverse relationships in the community;

2. Having the technology and dynamic internal communications/culture to assemble and actively disseminate the latest information about those relationships to all staff.

That’s it, folks. Focus all your energies and staff on these two issues and your organization will be sustainable in the long term. (Assuming, of course, you are the right people doing the right thing at the right time for your community)

Today’s washout is tomorrow’s prospect.

So how do you do what I am suggesting? Let’s take a look at a group of people who are doing them already – people who are raising money for institutions of higher education. You’ve seen them at airport hubs in shorts and a suit jacket, modern day bounty hunters, tracking down their prey. These gift officers put incredible focus on steadily building relationships and joining the dots between a complex net of interconnected people. Of course, they start with an advantage, that they have a finite group of ‘prospects’ with a common interest related to a shared past experience of their glorious alma mater. (And even if that experience was plain bad, the fundraiser knows that they can give it a decade or two and rely on the golden glow-generator of memory to make that graduate positively inclined towards the institution. Or maybe just call it Stockholm Syndrome!)

A human services nonprofit needs to build a similar kind of shared experience with its large number of potential supporters in ways both large and small. Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s Impact Group approach to focused service provision is already generating new communities of interest (and communities of resource development) for us, around shared interest areas like nutrition or diabetes care or poverty or through targeting specific geographical areas of highest need in our service area.

We seek to involve people beyond the ‘twanging heart strings’ level of financial support, because we want to directly connect people to an area of their on-going interest:

“The Foodbank are interested in optimum nutrition and exercise? So am I!

The Foodbank is working to provide special support to those with diabetes? I’ve got an aunt with diabetes!

The Foodbank is bringing special focus to build collaboratives to address poverty in a particular part of town? That’s the part of town my family pulled themselves out of, or that’s the part of town that I could make a lot of money long-term by investing in at the ground floor!

The list goes on and on and on. Everyone who supports us is interested in ameliorating hunger, but most are interested in so much more; in things that are ‘stickier’ than solely hunger, the perception of which will ebb and flow with (skewed or otherwise) perceptions of the local situation.

If we can engage people long term in a positive change area, then this is going to garner us far more sustainable resources to help us achieve our mission of building healthy communities through good nutrition.

 

If the CRM jigsaw only had four pieces, life would be so peaceful…

Technology can help us achieve this, because we can source new types of information on people and compare links between large amounts of data. We can utilize a cheap (or theoretically free to nonprofits) CRM (Constituent Relationship Manager) like Salesforce or spend lots of money on Raiser’s Edge or any of the other IT solutions out there. It doesn’t really matter what you use as long as you are aggregating and linking all that data, and taking all of those relationships seriously.

This demands that we bring a high level of sophistication and focus to fundraising efforts over a wider level of dollar donation, whereas before, this was only the purview of the major gift level. I am sensing the need for us to flatten out how we treat small scale and large-scale contributors to our organizations. People want more information, more access. We have to find ways of doing it that don’t suck us dry of time and money.

Clearly, it is not cost effective to spend hour upon hour of staff time to build a relationship with a very chatty $25 donor, which is why social media and utilizing groups of community supporters acting as a conduit, becomes vitally important. You might also be pleasantly surprised to discover that the contractor who gives you $25 at Christmas is one degree of separation away from the wealthy person who favors that contractor for the job of moving the west wing of their house to the east wing or whatever the current priority is.

The new Major Gifts Officer cracks a joke

Perhaps at this stage of the discussion, you might acknowledge the potential benefits of focusing on relationship building and mapping, but how do you make it happen with a staff that is already stretched tighter than Simon Cowell’s face?

It’s not only your patience I’m stretching

I have talked in previous posts of the potential upside of moving, however painfully, towards an employment model where everyone you hire is a leader or potential leader – whether they ride a desk or a forklift. Their job is to inspire, guide and when needed, manage the work of a shifting group of human resources that are paid ‘other than with money.’

This enables everyone in the organization to scale the impact they could achieve on their own. They work with volunteers, community leaders (super volunteers), knowledge philanthropists and interns.

For this to work, processes need to be simplified and automated, online training needs to be provided for tasks, and we need the ability to break down complex tasks into smaller discrete sub-tasks which can be taken on by those with only a modest amount of time to commit to the organization. The upside for employees of this kind of ‘outside-in’ organization is that they will be become better paid.

If this wasn’t confronting and challenging enough by itself, I am further suggesting that you need to up the ante by insisting that all staff be tasked with bringing resources into the organization as well. (And be rewarded for doing so).

However small your staff is, they have between them relationships with the people who have the relationships with the people that are waiting to be inspired and actively engaged in your mission, and which will bring it the sustainability of funding that it needs to succeed. You just need to give staff the confidence, permission and motivation to start to grow and link those relationships.

I’m afraid this involves more of that indigestion-provoking medicine called ‘culture change’ and the kind of cross-functional teams and situations that can get people talking and sharing what and who they know.

This now brings us to considering the distinction that I drew earlier, when I said it was more a question of getting staff, board and volunteers to understand that what we are asking of them is not ‘fundraising,’ but ‘resource acquisition’ which is different. The more introverted members of your team can be reassured that ‘resource acquisition is far less scary and embarrassing than fundraising.

It is not asking your friends for money. REPEAT. It is not asking your friends for money.

Rather it is building a matrix charting the varying resource needs of the organization alongside the different interest/involvement areas that your organization provides, and then to begin to join the dots themselves about who they know who might be interested in what area.

The whole organization pitched in to bring home the bacon (and the wooly mammoth, and the hippo and the python) Where’s Russell Crowe when you need him?

This kind of culture change also involves tasking staff who come to you with great idea for a new initiative with getting involved in generating the resources to put that initiative into action.

To which they reply: Wait, isn’t it the development department’s job to come up with the money to make my initiative a reality? I mean I can work up a budget or something, but the development director needs to schmooze some people and write some begging letters, because that’s their expertise, right?

Development Departmental Mascot

It is their job, however it is also the job of the employee with the lightbulb over their head. Again it is a question of breaking down the elements of this initiative into chunks of people, things and money. We can’t afford to pay for everything ourselves, because that would be hogging all the fun, right? So where are new resources for each of these chunks out there in the community, which are laying in the hands of people who are waiting for the opportunities that their social investment in you will bring them, their employers, families and groups.

I would argue that the required resources for many new initiatives are out there, they just need to be tapped, and who better to do it than the person who within your organization who is excited by what that new initiative can achieve? Of course they are working in tandem with the accepted development team, so that you minimize toe-stepping and mixed messaging, but they can play a key role in helping to drive the process. They can get involved in meeting with people who may be able to play and working their own set of relationships and forging new relationships built on common interest and shared vision.

I don’t know about you, but when I walk into an all-staff meeting, I don’t see a bunch of job titles sitting around, I see everyone as a walking ‘Kickstarter’ campaign ready to inspire the community to deliver on an amazing idea.

Get out there and bring back the resources

This doesn’t mean that the development department is getting off the hook, oh no. They have to utilize the same approach. If they come up with great new fundraising ideas, they also need to come up with the people (who are not paid staff) who want to execute the idea. They also need a logical framework for how this activity is going to get some oversight and accountability from within our organization. This requires us to work with trusted volunteers who can engage with other volunteers or community organizations. We also need to rely on a sharing technology and culture to enable us to mitigate the risk of a crazy or self-serving person doing damage to our good name/brand.

These days, we are all Sherlock Holmes, looking for the clues and connections that are going to close the case or close the campaign, and build an organization that is sustained by the community for generations to come. Your mission deserves nothing less, right?

Are Non-Profits afraid of Competition? How can we tackle the root causes of hunger in America? Tough Questions from a Community Grantmaker – A dialogue with Mari Ellen R. Loijens, CFRE.

Mari Ellen Loijens

Is there a life after food banking? Apparently so. Mari Ellen Loijens worked in development for Second Harvest Foodbank in Santa Clara and San Mateo County from 2000 to 2004, and is now the Chief Philanthropic Development and Information Officer for the Silicon Valley Foundation.

Of course it is every fundraising professional’s secret fantasy to then go on to work at a foundation and give it away rather than have beg for it. (Without appreciating the challenges that go with such a responsibility). So what’s the difference between your time in the food bank looking out, and outside the food bank looking in?

When I was at the food bank, the needs were constantly growing. There was no single year where we had to feed less people than the year before, and I had a strong sense of urgency about the growing need. Now that I’m outside, it seems like it’s endless and I’m more anxious for real solutions to the issue.  It’s sort of like being an emergency room doctor, and your concern is how to bandage all the wounds for those who need immediate assistance. Then when you walk outside the emergency room, you think, “How can we avoid the people going there in the first place?”

That’s a question a lot of food bankers are asking themselves. Like me, they’ve seen the capacity of food banks grow with their success at fund raising and their ability to bring more food in to their service area. This has created more ongoing demand, so it’s kind of a spiral.  How do you think that food banks could get out of this demand spiral and move towards a long-term solution?

We really need to look at some policy changes.  We are a very wealthy nation and the notion that we have so many people who turn to others for such a basic need is troubling.  Clearly there is something wrong with a system in which many children go to school hungry.

Food banks and other nonprofits are always very reluctant about stepping into these waters, because they worry about offending donors whose political slant may lead them to believe that we are just ‘enabling’ people.  How can we navigate these waters?

Want to dip your toe in…

I think that the problem is that we focus too narrowly on just food.  If you only think, “I need to feed people,” and you think, “That’s my only issue,” then we’re back to the doctor in the emergency room who would be saying: “I’m trying to get people to stop bleeding, and it’s so expensive to keep using up all these wound dressings. So the solution is that we need more money for more wound dressings.”  It’s a symptom he’s dealing with, not the cause. In the same way, hunger is the not cause, it is the symptom of a greater problem in our system. This comes down to something like minimum wage.  Do we have a living wage?  Are people able to earn enough where they live in order to take care of something as basic as food and shelter? We have got to move beyond pushing for increased SNAP (food stamp) benefits and into the bigger issues like: How do we make sure people, who are able, can earn enough money to feed themselves and their families?

So, are you saying that hunger is a symptom of the condition of poverty, or of something else?

I think poverty itself is also a symptom. I’m not a socialist or a communist. I don’t believe that everyone should make the same money, but I do believe that Americans, if asked, would say it’s wrong to have a system which forces people to constantly be in abject  poverty and unable to get out of it, even if they are working hard, perhaps at multiple jobs.  At some point, we are going to have to make decisions about how we pay for our beliefs and values. In the same way we are asked to make tough decisions now about taxes and how we want to pay for the things that we believe our country needs, such as roads or to provide the fire and police services that we want. In the same way, we have to ask ourselves the question: if we think it’s wrong for a child in a developing country to make a dollar a day sewing t-shirts, how are we going to provide an adequate minimum wage so that people in America who work a whole day can feed themselves and provide at the most basic level for their families?

And so how do you see the situation in America now?

I think we have an unspoken social contract in this country which prevents people from moving up out of poverty, and much of that is as a result of not have a living wage in most places.  We also do not have systems in place that update the minimum wage as the cost of living modifies in an area.  The systems that we do have reward the wealthy and do not help the poor.  This means we have to really look at our whole social contract as a country and our value system and say, “Have we set in place laws that support the values that we claim are American?”

Bumper sticker seen outside Santa Barbara’s swankest hotel.

This is the point in the conversation where people begin to squabble about the meaning of the ‘American Dream.’ I see an unspoken fear in many donors I talk to. I would preface my comments by pointing out that these donors are caring and generous people who sincerely want to ‘pay it back’ and provide some level of support for those in need within their communities. However, they may have a voice deep within them, that reminds them how hard they had to struggle and sacrifice to get where they are, so why should they make it easy for someone else? They often don’t see the incredible daily sacrifices and struggles of those in poverty who can find no success story on the back of their struggle.

Whatever the sentiment, Uncle Sam gets pressed into service to wag that finger.

This is why food banks have been so successful, because there is a lot of interest in ameliorating the symptoms but a deep fear of taking the plunge to actually deal with the causes. Either donors are concerned that they will be heavily taxed and lose what they worked for, or they fear that the fabric of American society will change and everyone will expect things to be provided for them without working for them. Consequently they see America losing its ‘can do’ spirit of entrepreneurship and resourcefulness. The type of change that is required to actually deal with a problem is too scary. The same thing is true for issues of immigration, health care and the rest of the sad litany. This means we have to stand around with our hands tied or else harken back to some previous time in our country’s history where these problems were better hidden.

I think a new consensus for action needs to arise that returns the much-loved but threadbare teddy bears of left and right political philosophy to the nursery shelf, and for us to admit that we have grown out of them. They’ll always have a fond place in our heart they were both great in key moments at getting us to the point we are now at as a nation, but now they are getting in the way as our nation enters maturity. These security blankets are getting under foot and gridlocking our ability to do what we do best as Americans – which is to fix something in a no-nonsense straight-forward way.

“I’ve been manhandled so much, I don’t remember whether I’m Republican or Democrat.”

I know from over a decade of working to assist either the homeless or the struggling, that the amount of people sitting on their gluteus maximus and freeloading their way from society (amongst poor people, anyway) is absolutely tiny, just as the amount of people defrauding SNAP benefits is a minuscule amount in relation to the total. Are we going to allow an obsession with preventing the enabling of a few who don’t want to help themselves hold us back from making huge achievements as a country for the vast majority of Americans who work so incredibly hard?

Sounds great, we should import that stuff to America! (Cheaply, of course)

Can you imagine what greatness we could achieve as a nation if we weren’t all so consumed with fear about being able to get affordable medical help, or that we will be living in abject poverty as senior citizens? Modern free market economies are driven by so much advertising and marketing, that are showing people all the things they need to have in their lives to be happy. These forces provide a huge encouragement for people to produce more and earn more. If we can provide a counter-balancing support safety net for all Americans, it won’t extinguish this desire for more – which is equally part of the American temperament. The two can complement each other perfectly well. It’s not exactly a shining city on a hill, but it’s a workable system where we can all move forward at our own pace and to our own ability.

Forgive me for that. As a food banker, if you see a pile of pallets, then your natural inclination is to climb on top of them and start spouting off…

That’s quite all right, Erik. Keep breathing. Seriously, though, I think food banks need to get get braver about legislation. You need to move past the daily problem of feeding people, and start to collaborate with others that can focus on solutions and really start to ask the difficult questions of, “What’s the issue?”  Yet for reasons that you mentioned, like when you referred to SNAP fraud, I think food banks are very afraid sometimes of moving in that area, because if you did a survey of people you feed and even one person said, “Well because I don’t feel like working.”  That’s a terrible, terrible fear of food banks. Suddenly, no one might want to fund their food bank, because there is one person whose is working the system. So essentially, we are ready to punish and live in fear of that one person.  Well, there is always going to be someone working the system.  There are people who go to emergency rooms, because they don’t feel like paying for a doctor. We absolutely can’t set up systems to deal with that one person. We look at the big issues in our country like educations reform and how healthcare reform and you hear about those things all the time. I would love to hear our country talk about poverty reform.  How we are going to help make a sweep of changes that would impact the base line of our country and help bring people who are essentially stuck because it’s impossible to move on or move out.

So, who do you think are the right people to lead this movement or does it need to come from a ground swell at a local level?  

I think both. That is how the civil rights movement happened.  You start with that real grass roots movement from people who are experiencing the issues and people who support those people.  Then at some point you get the attention of people in a power position with legislation to be able to move those issues forward.

You mentioned that food banks are timid on the public policy front.  What else do you think food banks could do to make this happen? 

Well, I really like the ideas espoused in your blog about how your food bank is working on regarding entering the preventative healthcare arena. I do think that when you start to see yourself as part of a wider system rather than just an individual issue, then you are able to address bigger issues that have bigger impact. Poverty is not the root cause.  People became poor for a reason. The fact that they are poor is not the issue.  The fact that they became poor and can’t get out of being poor is the issue.

This requires food banks to build broad coalitions with other social service agencies in their service areas, some who may be member agencies and some who may not.

That is a challenge, because there is often reluctance for everyone to sit down and have a substantive dialogue about how do we move things forward?  The subtext from non profit leaders can often be: “I don’t really want to be in a room with them.  I don’t want to compete with them.”

Hey, you’ve been in some of the same rooms as me!

That’s the truth about a lot of nonprofits is they’re just completely uncomfortable with the idea of competition, and if I had the answer to this issue, I’d probably be able to save the world.

Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition.

Well, we’re non profits. Competition is way too business-like and vulgar for us, right?

Yes, you’re very sensitive souls. But, it has to start with non profits admitting it is an issue. Then I think, speaking as a funder, that there is a clear role for funders in facilitating this issue. I think it’s all power dynamics. The one with the power has the obligation. Foundations really have the obligation to reach out to the nonprofits and say, “I really want to know and I really want to understand what’s going on.  Why is this collaboration and conversation not working for you? Where they don’t have to sit in front of their competitor and say what their fears are. We can ask who would you want to collaborate with and how, on what terms?”  I think having an honest dialogue is what moves things forward. This sort of thing needs to occur one on one or in small groups. Large gatherings can neutralize everyone’s desire to make anything happen.

I think what you say about the competition angle is very interesting, because it’s kind of taboo to talk about nonprofits competing. To be a good non profit citizen, you can only talk in the language of shared impact and collaboration. It might be very liberating for people to also have a conversation about competition and to say it is absolutely all right. I presume there is fear that we would be acknowledging duplication of service if we acknowledged competition. Certainly something for people to consider starting a discussion about in their service area.

How do you think food banks and other human services and nonprofit should be thinking about evolving their funding streams over the next few years?

I think if you are looking for systems change, at some point that goes against the grain for sustainability, right?  You want to be working towards your services not being needed anymore. The ideal is that you want to be able to talk about what system changes are you creating, so that you should have to provide fewer and fewer services every year?  That should be the big boast.  “Last year we fed 200,000 people, but this year, thanks to our hard work, we only have to feed 150,000.”

But every nonprofit organization in the world is afraid to do that, because then they assume that the funders will come back and say, “Oh, you need less money this year.”  And so the organization declines.

I think that there is a new generation of funders that have a very different way of thinking, and that what people really want to see are problems solved.  People are tired of the same problems staying around for generations and generations.  You’re right, though. Every nonprofit I know like to boast about how they did even more; served even more. It is a treadmill. But this new generation of funders comes from a very different way of thinking that would say: “No, no, no. The metric I care about is not how many people you serve, but that you made systemic changes so you will have to feed fewer people moving forward.“ It is a way for your organization to evolve to be truer to its mission.

Mari Ellen, thanks so much for your ideas and for your work supporting non profits.

What Every Emergency Food Provider Can Do To Boost Client Health: A Dialogue on Food Insecurity and the Management of Chronic Disease with Dr. Hilary Seligman

Dr. Hilary Seligman, MD, MAS

Dr. Hilary Seligman, MD, MAS, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine within UC San Francisco’s Center For Vulnerable Populations and a general internist at San Francisco General Hospital. She is also affiliated with the UCSF Center for Obesity Assessment, Study and Treatment. Dr. Seligman’s work focuses on food security and its effect on the development and management of chronic diseases such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes and heart failure.

There is a reasonable amount of awareness about the health burden that food insecurity places on early childhood development, but not so much with adults, and I find that a really interesting element of your research.

We have largely ignored the long-term health implications of food insecurity among adults.  And so what I’ve tried to do is firstly figure out if there are health implications for adults, and – yes – there do seem to be important health implications.  They’re a little harder to talk about because it’s a little more complicated than just saying iron deficiency anemia, but I think the message needs to get out there that food insecurity has nutritional implications that are important, not only for children, but for adults too.

We all get so amped up trying to save the next generation that we forget the current one – and that would be you and me, folks!

At the recent Feeding America summit, you made a presentation that used diabetes as an example of the intersection between food insecurity and the successful management of chronic disease. (Food Insecurity and Health Presentation Feeding America Network Summit 4.19.12 ) 

A key element, which I think has wider relevance as we help our clients with their nutrition, concerns the cycles of food adequacy and inadequacy. We might expect a compensatory strategy of skipping meals, (leading to hypoglycemia) during times of food shortage, but you demonstrated that even when these people had enough food, it led to systematic overconsumption – people wanting to feast now that it was not a time of famine – which had similarly negative effects on the control of their diabetes, leading to hyperglycemia.

Yes, and food insecure adults required about five more physician encounters per year than those that are food secure.

In so far as the Food Bank Network touches an extraordinary number of people, and particularly people who are very high risk for the varied diseases that food insecurity predisposes people to, namely obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases, food banks really present an unbelievable opportunity to be part of the solution to the nutritional inadequacy and the typical food-insecure adult diet.

So what do you think food banks should be doing to help address this situation?

Food banks often reach a person at least once a month, in a context that allows them to talk about diet and provide nutritious food.  People are much more willing to talk about their diet when they go into an environment in anticipation of leaving with food. And then it’s the challenge of what kind of food does the food bank provide, and how much of that food will provide a high nutrient value.

As distributors of food, we can potentially get stuck in a place of having to provide clients with donated food which may provide them with an overgenerous supply of calories but  that doesn’t do much to build their nutritional health. The other tough place is unsustainable spending healthier food, which even with the buying power of a food bank can be hugely expensive.

Totally. There are huge distribution and logistics challenges. I think what we have to do is take the first step which is to look at it and acknowledge that obesity and diabetes are a huge problem in the clients that are served by food banks and that food banks have the potential to greatly assist with that management.

We are now in a new situation where the ‘emergency food’ situation is becoming the new norm for a large number of our clients. Do you think that requires a greater degree of responsibility for what kind of food we are distributing?

It does. Food banks are being asked to feed people year after year after year because SNAP is underfunded.  And that’s where we get the problem.  It is the chronicity of use I think that makes essential an increased nutritional value in the food bank offerings. The other thing that’s changed is that an individual calorie has become so cheap that it’s really easy to get too many of them. You can get a lot of calories from poor food and feel full, but you won’t get any nutritional value from it. This is especially true of the food insecure clientele accessing services from a food bank or member agency.

Since the dawn of time, mankind has worshipped the Twinkie. (And it’s still fresh).

I’ve heard the argument that non-nutritional calories (Twinkies and chips and pretzels) are so cheap that anybody can afford those in the United States, and the food bank should only be there to provide fruits and vegetables and other very healthy food items.  That is a more extreme view, right?  That’s not necessarily my absolute view, but there is a certain value in considering whether clients can afford more expensive calories, and therefore considering what type of food that food banks should be providing in the future.

Why did this glorious union never capture the imagination of the Great American Public?

Particularly as access to these cheaper calories become more difficult for food banks, as corporations continue to become more efficient with their inventory. If the food in a food bank resembles the proportions of the contents of the USDA’s My Plate, that would be an ideal situation: half fruits and vegetables, a quarter whole grains and a quarter protein – lean meats and protein substitutes.

Our food bank is pursuing a steady transition to a specifically preventative healthcare agenda. Our goal is to leverage short-term relief of hunger and food insecurity into longer-term shifts of client behaviors around food leading to better health. This means an integrated series of programs starting with expectant mothers and following children through right up to the high school level. This means outcome-based evaluation, which is very challenging, yet we feel it is essential to gain the credibility to exist in this new and potentially very powerful space. However, we’re nothing if not a joyful ‘Heinz 57 Varieties’ of a network. Do you think that there is a lot that any food bank can do to move forward a healthy food agenda without having the particular focus that we have. 

Yes, I think every food bank can make big strides, whatever their resources or approach. The link between dietary intake and obesity and diabetes is clear enough that just documenting an increased intake or increased access to fruits and vegetables is enough to create an important public health message to the client group.

By the same token, you don’t necessarily have to show that BMI goes down or that diabetes is better controlled, because that link is well established enough. Just showing that fruits and vegetables are desired, they’re taken, and they’re eaten at home rather than ‘they spoiled and I threw them away,’ that’s enough.

Surely education – in what we like to term food literacy – plays a key role here?

Yes, the evidence in the academic literature suggests that protein is the most significant problem, because clients are reluctant to shift to non-meat proteins. Particularly in low-income communities, it’s not considered a meal unless you have meat, and that’s not the most nutritious message.  Other protein sources like beans and lentils and tofu are cheaper than meat and offer great nutritional value, but that’s an education message that we need to be communicating as well, and it’s often a hard sell.

When in doubt, have a festival! Still time to book for this August, Lentil Lovers!

What doesn’t seem to be as much of an educational issue is fruits and vegetables.  People like access to fruits and vegetables and will take them it when they are available, and when they take it, they eat it.  So the bigger educational barrier to me seems to be in the protein choices. In terms of fruits and vegetables, the big place where education needs to be done, I think, is with produce that people aren’t so familiar with, whether for cultural or other reasons. Particularly because these less familiar fruits and vegetables often end up at food banks.

Tell me about it! Every day for us is ‘Three Hundred Things to do with a Persimmon.’ Martha Stewart has nothing on us!

Only Martha could make Food Insecurity aspirational…

So, I would like to ask you what is your definition of optimal food security? How can we define it in an individual seeking our services and how can we measure our interaction with that person to know whether they are able to attain it?

That’s a great question.  You know, this is, again, my personal opinion.  People will disagree with me.  But I think that the way you know someone’s food secure is they’re not coming back to the food bank. Even if you report on a food security survey that you’re not worried about running out of food because of money, 99% of people who answer that they’re food secure on a survey administered by a food bank are doing so because they have come to rely on that food bank as a chronic source of their food intake.  And so they don’t need those additional food resources because they have the food bank.

I have a dream, where little white birds and little black birds pick up little spoons and feed all the boys and girls.

So where would you like to see the Food Bank Network in 5 years, as relates to this area?

I would love there to be some relatively straight forward way that food banks can record their product as high nutrient value versus standard nutrient value, so that there is a simple way to track improvement.

Feeding America is looking for other markers of success that are more nutritionally than poundage focused, and of course different food banks are already using systems such as CHOP (Choose Healthy Options Program) to rank their food.

Yes, though I think oftentimes they’re difficult to operationalize.  So I would love to see that food banks can set individual quality goals around improved nutrition.  Many food banks already have the skills around refrigeration and quick distribution, so it is more about developing the infrastructure for all food banks so they can respond if say a farm were to call up and say I have 100 pallets of broccoli, will you take it?  Many food banks would say, no, we can’t take that much because we can’t refrigerate it or distribute it quickly enough.  This is a hurdle that deserves to remain a major focus.

Hilary, thanks for your significant research in this area and for your support of and belief in the work of food banks.

RESOURCE

Link – Journal of Nutrition, 2010 February –  Food Insecurity Is Associated with Chronic Disease among Low-Income NHANES Participants

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Welcome

Here I am, the self-styled “King O’ The Yams.’ Standing on the prow of the Titanic, Leo was “King of the World.” Well I’m sitting on a pile of boxes of yams in a drafty warehouse, and so I’m ‘King O’ The Yams.’ Hopefully I can keep my head above the ice water at least…

“From Hunger to Health” is the blog of Erik Talkin, CEO of the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County. We distributed over 11 million lbs of food last year (of which half was fresh produce) to Santa Barbara County through our own programs and through our network of 290 member agencies and programs. We are proud members of Feeding America, the nationwide network of food banks.

This blog serves  both as a call to action and a clearing house of information, but most of all it is the story of how one organization on the inside of the ‘hunger business’ is trying to redefine what a food bank can achieve in transforming the health of our communities through good nutrition. At the top of the page are drag down menus providing access to a number of pages of content on key topics of interest.

For too long, food banks have been looked at as a band aid on a problem that will never go away, or worse, as organizations that unwittingly serve to disempower those individuals that they seek to help.

Maybe it’s time we got out of the hunger business and into the health business. Hopefully this blog will help others to navigate a similar journey. It’s fun, it’s exciting – and just ask my friend below – we can’t be stopped!