Keeping it out of the dumpster

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1994 by Joseph McConnell

Not everyone agrees. U.S.A. Harvest is a network of aggressively individualistic food rescue programs, started by a man named Stan Curtis and modeled after his Kentucky Harvest operation. Curtis comes across as a booster, the classic Middle American businessman with what reporters like to call "boundless energy." His view of the food rescue process is an allvolunteer vision, with no paid staff and no fundraising activities; they just move food. He begins by telling you that "nobody gets paid, nobody gets a big executive job... we are nothing more than a group that wants to have a positive effect." Nevertheless, U.S.A. Harvest won't participate in Foodchain; in fact, Curtis told me that he doesn't know "what Foodchain is." For their part, while the mainstream food rescue groups acknowledge the contribution that U.S.A. Harvest chapters make -- where they operate in the same areas, they may cooperate to a certain extent -- the wish is expressed again and again: it would be better if they brought their energy and enthusiasm to the common table; it would be better if they came in from the cold.

TWO VOLUNTEERS ARE standing outside a dormitory cafeteria, button-holing undergraduates as they go in to dinner, asking them to "give up a meal a month, feed the hungry right here in Ypsilanti." It's the third year we've run the program: students agree to skip certain meals, the university donates the equivalent savings in food, university staff donate their time to prepare it, and we take it to feeding agencies. The first two years, we had to explain that over and over again. This year, we seem to have reached critical mass; they're coming to us, saying, "Where do I sign up? .... I did this last year, too." "Come on, Fred, sign it. It's good for you." In two hours, we get nearly 200 names.

FOOD GATHERERS is a food rescue program located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1988, Paul Saginaw, co-owner of Zingerman's Delicatessen, decided to put some ideas on food rescue into practice. Saginaw says that a good business takes care of its customers, its employees, and its community; Zingerman's had been wildly successful, and it was time to "give something back." An employee, Lisa De Young, was ready for a change and interested in the challenge; the deli paid her a salary and provided a tiny office, freezer and cooler space, the loan of vehicles, clerical support, phones. The initial pool of volunteers drew heavily on the Zmgerman's staff.

Lisa De Young started out doing it all -- running food, writing grant proposals, lining up donors and agencies. Things went pretty well; today, Food Gatherers has eight people on staff, runs two refrigerated trucks, and moves forty to sixty thousand pounds of food a month. Food Gatherers is a transporter model, working with seventy to eighty volunteers, most of whom do food runs. Staff include an associate director (essentially an operating officer), a donor and agency coordinator, an outreach coordinator (a term that nonprofits seem to use when they mean "public relations"), a part time funding development person, a much-needed administrative coordinator, and two part-time paid food runners. Together with the area's long-established Huron Harvest Food Bank, the group just purchased a defunct meatpacking plant, tuming it into a centralized food distribution point for the county.