Inefficiency

On Wednesday, I wrote about Janet Poppendieck's book, Sweet Charity, and specifically the chapter, "The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food."  Yesterday I expanded a bit on "Insufficiency."  Today, let's tackle "Inefficiency."

If you're a regular supporter / follower of Foodshare, you know that we talk a lot about the organization's efficiency - with just $30, we can provide enough food for a person for a month - so you might naturally wonder why I want to talk about inefficiency!

The book's main point is not about the food bank model, where we save food that would otherwise be discarded, often by the tractor-trailer load, and get it out to organizations that serve people in need.  Rather it's about food drives, both the local ones run by schools and faith groups and the big regional or national ones run by organizations like postal workers or scouts.

This graphic that Foodshare uses tells part of the story:

But it's not the whole story.  Let's dig a little deeper...

With these drives, the donor pays full retail price.  Then it costs more money and labor to sort, pack, transport, store and distribute the food.  Although some of these services may be donated, they still cost someone money!  The end result is that it can cost as much as the value of the food to get the food from that original donor to the person who needs it.  We'd do much better to just give the low-income family the cash that the original donor was going to spend in the grocery store and let them go to the store with it themselves!  Which is just one of the reasons SNAP is a better way to get food to people in need!

The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food

Although it was written in 1998, Janet Poppendieck's book, "Sweet Charity?  Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement," has much to say to us today.

The book describes food charities (food banks, food pantries, community kitchens) functioning as a moral safety valve which have allowed us as a society to accept the erosion of government's role in fighting poverty and hunger.

My favorite part of the book continues to be the chapter on "The Seven Deadly In's of Emergency Food."  The following are among the reasons that private, charitable, emergency food programs like food banks cannot solve the hunger problem:  Insufficiency (there's not enough food), Inappropriateness (it's not the right food); nutritional Inadequacy (it's not healthy food), Instability (programs are hand-to-mouth relying on volunteers and uncertain funding streams), Inaccessability (people in need can't get to the charities), Inefficiency (the can of food ends up costing several times its real cost from the time someone purchases it and donates it to a food drive until it gets to the person in need), and Indignity (bread lines in America today!).

Fifteen years later and all of these things are still true.  And yet, we still have politicians calling for massive cuts in federal food programs "because the private charities can take care of it."  The private charities weren't meeting the need in 1998 when Ms. Poppendieck wrote her book and we have fallen further behind every year since.  Our motto at Foodshare is, "When hunger stops, so will we," but these days, I find myself asking, when will this madness end?

Feed Your Mind, Feed Your Neighbor…

Well known leadership author, consultant and speaker David A. O'Brien has partnered with Foodshare to offer his new e-book, "The Navigator’s Compass, 101 Steps Toward Leadership Excellence" to leaders like you. For every copy sold, David will donate 100% of the proceeds to Foodshare to support our mission to end hunger in greater Hartford. In addition to feeding your mind, this represents a wonderful opportunity to help feed our neighbors too.

Based on lessons from a distinguished leadership career that spans twenty five years, the book is a collection of David’s most popular articles which examine the key dimensions of leadership excellence. The book explores some of leadership’s most pressing challenges including, Employee Engagement, Organizational Change, Development Coaching and Emotional Intelligence. It presents proven processes and methodologies for helping leaders to turn these challenges into opportunities for peak performance.

Many thanks to David for choosing to support Foodshare’s work through this unique fundraiser!

You can buy the book here.

Holiday weekend reading

Over the weekend just past, I read the book, "Toxic Charity" by Robert Lupton.  This is a book primarily about churches and the charity projects they undertake, but it has lessons for all of us working to build a better world.

Two themes that really resonated with me (and I'm sure there may be more in the future):

Volunteer projects - When a group or even an individual wants to volunteers, it's important to establish your own motives.  Is it more important that the volunteer activity meet the needs of the volunteers or the needs of the community / the organization you are volunteering with?

This may seem easy to answer, but I can't tell you how many times people have called me with ideas for things they want to do that don't really meet Foodshare's needs or mission.  They often have a hard time accepting "no" for an answer, even though I think that we are, for the most part, pretty diplomatic in providing that answer! 

Then there are the volunteer groups who expect us to spend our limited resources to feed the volunteers lunch or provide t-shirts or other things.  We've already spent a lot of resources in staff time setting up and organizing the project, and we generally say no to those requests, also!

Ending hunger or poverty -  The book has lots of examples of programs that have not succeeded in ending the social ill they set out to fight.  And a little guidance about how to do better.  Lupton says the key is in relationships.

"To effectively impact a life, a relationship must be built, trust forged, accountability established.  And this does not happen in long, impersonal lines of strangers.  A name and a story have to be attached to each indivdual face.  Highly personal life struggles must be explored and with each person a unique action plan created.  A bed for the night...where to get a job...treatment for addiction...escape from an abusive husband...childcare for homeless children...a wheelchair for an amputee."

This is the same conclusion that the Board of Directors and staff at Foodshare came to in writing our current strategic plan.  We won't end hunger by building a bigger food bank and distributing more and more food.  We will end hunger one family at a time, because each family's needs will be different.  And we can only do this by mobilizing an army of volunteers who will work one-on-one with people in need and build these kinds of relationships.

We're still working out some of the details about how to do that and welcome anyone to the table to be part of the discussion!