FOOD FOR ALL ERA 15: A Decade to Celebrate

What a time we had at the Redlands Country Club. It was September 1995, a balmy evening. A couple hundred people dressed up to celebrate ten years of growth from a two-store test of the FOOD FOR ALL supermarket customer contributions program to 1370 participating stores with the only year-round program focused on alleviating and eliminating hunger. The Country Club was chosen because two of our participating grocers happened to be members and were willing to use their influence. Paul and Dorothy Gerrard and Jack and Debbie Brown were gracious hosts and several of the Gerrards and Stater Bros. company family members attended. Our staff members did all the work on invitations, décor, menus and format for the evening. All Linda and I had to do was show up.

There were congratulations and honors to go around. Members of our Board of Directors and Advisors, volunteers, dignitaries and friends gathered for a grand celebration. Celebrity Steve Allen was engaged to provide entertainment. He and his wife Jayne Meadows had signed on to our Southern California campaign and, after learning more about our cause, he actually drove to Redlands by himself and even donated the $250 standard honorarium he would have received.

We got our money’s worth as he held forth from the piano for an hour with his usual humor and warm presence. Honors were heaped on Paul Gerrard and Jack Brown and each made their obligatory remarks. Jack loved to tell the story of the time he ran into me at a Redlands drug store and noticed the car I was then driving. It was a 1978 Honda hatchback which had an unfortunate encounter resulting in the left side looking like it had been side-swiped by a pickup truck, which it had. In those days we couldn’t afford to have it repaired. Jack finished his comments about how Stater Bros. came to take on the FOOD FOR ALL program with: “I knew Milan was my kind of nonprofit executive. I’ve seen the car he drives.”

So went the evening. Linda and I were surprised with a presentation of a watercolor portrait of us by Albert Landeros, a well-known Redlands artist who had designed our first display header cards. It hung in my office until we retired and is now in our “archives” since it is too large for our tiny condo.

This was a memorable evening celebrating a decade worth remembering. The coming decade would prove just as memorable, for many different reasons.

Snapshot #1—August 1993 through July 1994:

The grant we received from Phillip Morris/Kraft was to be used primarily for marketing our program to supermarkets. The first part was used up in a feasibility study and went to pay consultants and their expenses. The second part of $75,000 was to go toward hiring a professional director of marketing. After a month-long search we settled on a person from the advertising end of the food industry. I am not going to include his name because of his brief tenure with us. I will only say that he was paid more than my salary, spent most of his time hunkered down in his office cranking out marketing documents, and spent much of our marketing budget re-designing our donation cards, which we had to discard after I let him go. Lesson learned: There are professionals and there are professionals.

In spite of spending a good part of our fiscal year that was supposed to be devoted to growing our supermarket program spinning our wheels, or worse, re-inventing them, we were able to grow our customer contribution base to $742,000 and provide grants of $680,000 to hundreds of local and to 21 international projects. This was mainly due to the dedicated volunteers and the partnering efforts of our existing retailers and food industry supporters. A highlight of the year for me personally was our September ’93 annual meeting where we elected four new board members and John Benner as Chairman.

John came to us first as an assignment by his boss at Lucky Stores. A busy Senior Vice President for Administration, I always assumed he was there to make sure we were using those customer contributions wisely. But I soon learned what kind of man he is. He immediately pitched in and gave generously of his time and always gave us kindly but clear guidance. We often had to meet at his Lucky headquarters offices and wait until he was released from one or another executive meeting that had been called at a moment’s notice. John was there for us. There were times when I might have given in to despair but for his steadying influence. His natural way of working with people and his humor kept a number of our board members going when the going got rough. His friendship was genuine, and I cherish that as I do so many of those I had the good fortune of working alongside. I had been after him for at least a couple of years to take a more active leadership role and was elated when he finally agreed to accept the chairmanship of our board. John will become a true partner in leading FOOD FOR ALL into the future, even after I am gone.

Snapshop #2—You would think I had learned my lesson by now. But after hiring and firing one “chief marketing officer” and still having the mandate of our relationship with Phillip Morris/Kraft to expand our supermarket program, I decided that ‘three is better than one’ and charged ahead like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Well, not that I made these decisions all alone, but I will acknowledge that “the buck stopped here” as my friend Frank’s hero Harry Truman was fond of saying. So I hired a marketing director, a communications director, and a fundraiser. All this occurred during our fiscal year July 1994 to June 1995.

My confidence was buoyed up by a stop I made at the Redlands downtown post office, which was my assigned task as I walked the 3/4 mile to our office every morning. There was an envelope from an accounting firm in Las Vegas. Inside was a check for $50,000. It was made payable to “The Salvation Army Food for All Program.” My heart jumped and then dropped. Must be a mistake. I decided to send the check back to the accountant with a letter asking for clarification. The next week a check arrived made payable to “FOOD FOR ALL.” This was incredible. Who would send an unsolicited donation of $50,000? Over the next few months, more checks arrived. I think we received three or four checks in similar amounts. I decided, after the shock wore off, to phone the accounting firm in Las Vegas. I don’t even remember the name of the CPA, but I do remember he informed me that “this is not the total amount you will probably receive.” I then decided that I had better make a trip to Las Vegas. It turned out that this anonymous donor, a wealthy widow, had been buying FOOD FOR ALL donation cards for a few years before she died. Her husband had been a successful real estate agent. We were to receive a portion of an estate worth about 12 million dollars. Ours might be 2-3 million. Before you begin to congratulate me on our good fortune, I should tell you that the estate was totally tied up in real estate, and real estate lawyers were getting substantial fees for administering the estate. And the real estate market was in the process of tanking. I, of course, was unaware of this at the time. So we now had three new staff persons who were going to help us implement our expansion plan.

So what did our new additions bring to the party? I suppose I could credit them with helping us plan the 10^th anniversary celebration. I could say our new marketing director tried to arrange some promotions with food industry partners. I could say our fundraiser attempted to take the burden off the President in arranging our annual appeal to the food manufacturers. I could say our communications director tried to be creative in communicating our message. But what I came to see was that our three new staff members spent most of their time communicating with one another, strategizing about moving our office to a prominent location on Interstate 10, with signage to broadcast the FOOD FOR ALL name to passersby, and figuring out that it was time for our founder, Linda, to go. I, of course, was busy trying to expand our program nationwide, and was not aware of what was going on within our own organization. This is the reason I have decided to omit the names of our new hires. The people I allowed to be hired to help us, invariably, did not “get it.” From the three staff I hired in New England in the initial stages of introducing our program there, to the hiring of our marketing, PR and fundraising people, they just never got the message of what FOOD FOR ALL was all about.

 

But in spite of these minor issues, our fiscal year 1994-1995 saw our supermarket donation program grow to 1370 supermarkets in California, Nevada, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. Donations during this fiscal year reached $1,148,000. Our grant program allocated $455,000 in California, $60,000 in New England, and $173,000 to international self-help projects.

 

What a decade we had! What a ride we were on! What a privilege we were granted, to be a part of this amazing venture! Whatever the future holds, we will be there to experience and celebrate it! No matter what!

FOOD FOR ALL ERA 14B: A Two Year Blast

“Mr. Hamilton, my name is Adriene, my boss is Terry Fassburg, Vice President for Corporate Relations of Frito-Lay, based in Dallas. He likes what he heard about FOOD FOR ALL and would like you to come to Dallas, at our expense, to meet with supermarket executives and anti-hunger agencies.”

We were just getting rolling in California and slowly growing our program in New England, but this seemed like an offer we couldn’t refuse. Adriene made the flight reservations and when I arrived at the airport, I discovered that I was flying first-class, which was truly a first for me. I was used to taking Southwest where you were loaded in groups and they didn’t seem to know what first-class meant. In fact, on a subsequent flight to Dallas I had to ask Adriene to please “fly me coach.” It didn’t seem right for an executive of an anti-hunger fundraising organization to be flying that high.

However, I was wined and dined for a few days on two trips to Dallas-Fort Worth. Terry Fassburg was one of those food industry executives whose heart was in the right place. A tall, thin and trim thirty-something man in a dark blue suit. We hit it off from the start, even though his assistant made all the arrangements and appointments for me. The Alpha Beta chain had stores in the area, which was a natural connection for us, and we were received warmly and got a positive response. They were willing to install our program, assuming the local nonprofits, including the big Dallas Food Bank would support it. What could go wrong? Who is going to turn down an untapped source of funds for their work of providing food for hungry people? When Adriene and I met with two staffers of the Dallas Food Bank, we received lots of questions and some tentative responses. We wondered why the Executive Director, Lorrie somebody—I’ve forgotten her name, wasn’t present.

I left my second week in Dallas feeling like we had a go-ahead to bring FOOD FOR ALL to Texas. Frito-Lay was prepared to provide major financial and promotional backing. The retailers were ready, as were other nonprofits we met with. But there was one problem, which I discovered after Linda and I had left on a driving vacation to the Midwest. It was the middle of summer. We were somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I called to check in at the FOOD FOR ALL office. “Milan, Terry Fassburg is trying to reach you. He got a call from the Food Bank Director, who is accusing him of trying to pull a fast one for his and Frito-Lay’s benefit. He wants you to call her and try to straighten things out.” I spent the next hour on the phone with Lorrie somebody, being accused, politely of course, of everything from being a scam artist to taking food out of the mouths of hungry Texans. I learned something that summer about the politics of the anti-hunger business. Lorrie somebody was not only the Executive Director of one of the largest Second Harvest food banks in the country. She had also got herself elected to the Dallas City Council. And no one was going to come into her turf without her personal permission. Terry was totally blind-sided, devastated and humiliated. FOOD FOR ALL was not going to Dallas-Fort Worth. Lorrie somebody had won. It was truly a lose-lose-lose situation. I never found out whatever happened to Lorrie somebody. She certainly did not last long in either of her positions of power. But she had poisoned the well enough to keep a good thing from happening. And we had other fields to sow. Terry Fassburg still agreed to be on our Food Industry Advisory Board, but it was not more than a year later he was transferred to a position at PepsiCo’s headquarters on the east coast and we lost touch.

There were other markets where we were exploring expansion possibilities. Phoenix was one where we had some connections. Rich Blakley’s father was a retired lawyer who lived there and had connections with retail grocers. Ross Blakley hosted me on a couple of trips and introduced me to his contacts. We received interest but no commitments. And we were in the midst of a major campaign in Southern California. We needed to focus more attention there.

The two years from August 1991 to June of 1993 contain a swirl of activity that reads like a journal of highlights--from our newsletters:

August ’91--Independent supermarkets emphasis; World Food Day promotions in all three regions; new staff members Teresa Lingafelter and Alma Vierich hired; 8 new VISTA volunteers positions approved; FOOD FOR ALL chapters started.

 

November ’91—September gathering of 13 international NGOs; Gelson’s of LA added 20 more stores; 6^th annual meeting with 40 attending; Orange County Hunger Coalition facilitated by FOOD FOR ALL; new board members Barry Bauchwitz of food industry and Betty Elliott from Congressman Brown’s office; Neill Richards joins staff as east coast VP; Southern California Awareness Campaign gains momentum; promotions in stores with Buena Vista Winery, KABC LA and KSGN Riverside.

 

May ’92—Waldbaum’s Foodmart food show and presentation to President Ken Abrahams for his company’s passing the half-million dollar mark in customer contributions; decision to designate May store donations to victims of violence following the Rodney King verdict and riots, which happened right in the middle of our Southern California expansion campaign; executives of Kraft General Foods, Chiquita, and Certified Grocers join our Food Industry Advisors; Bill Chandler, Mayor Tom Bradley’s press secretary, joins our Public Relations Board; TV spots produced featuring actress Beverly Archer of Major Dad TV show and Harry Blackstone, world-renowned Magician and Redlands resident (Harry actually passed a wand through the center of an inflated balloon during the shoot); growing food industry support due to letter campaign headed by Larry Del Santo, Chairman of Lucky Stores; volunteer support continues to grow through formation of chapters and addition of Store Ambassadors; formation of a volunteer Connecticut FOOD FOR ALL Council; formation of a domestic hunger funding task force and survey of our Local Grant Boards and agencies to determine root causes of hunger.

 

November ’92—Albertson’s added 108 Southern California stores, Smith’s Food & Drug 16, Petrini’s 18 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Big Y in New England 25 new stores (due to our original supporter Dan Lescoe becoming VP of Marketing for Big Y); presented $100,000 to 43 agencies in response to victims of the April LA riots, attended by supermarket executives and Mayor Tom Bradley, as well as Kellogg’s Company (the one I met with early on and came away with 2 boxes of cereal) which sponsored a full-page ad in the LA Times in support of FOOD FOR ALL.; trade show presence at Food Marketing Institute (FMI) annual show in Chicago, California Grocers Convention (CGA) in San Diego, and Certified Grocers (CERGRO) in Long Beach; nationwide study for expansion feasibility funded by Phillip Morris and Kraft; new Board members Alan Moore of Kraft, Stan Thompson of The Thompson Company, and Kent Halkett of international law firm Sidley & Austin; began to advertise for a Marketing Director and store merchandisers; Store Ambassador campaign in full force; held a Southern California volunteer conference; second year of our VISTA grant; accounting software donated by SBT Company; pushed support for Congressman Tony Hall’s “hunger-free communities” initiative; $1.00 a week idea presented by a volunteer, claimed it would produce $6 million to fight hunger in our participating supermarkets; payroll donations for FOOD FOR ALL become a reality.

 

February ’93—Kraft Holiday promotion netted $40,000 from “A Single Person Can Make A Difference” tag line; Kraft promotion in Northern California with Lucky and Nob Hill Foods netted $28,000; Our Saviour Center of El Monte received the 1992 Nancy Chandler $5,000 award grant; high-lighted top ten stores, included Ralphs at La Brea & 3^rd in LA; received the 2^nd donated vehicle from board member and husband Georgianna and George Burney (became known as the FOOD FOR ALL McBurney-mobiles); honored unsung heroes of FOOD FOR ALL Lillick & Charles law firm of San Francisco, Grey Advertising, Italia Gal for TV spots, Impulse Broadcast Systems for Ralphs radio time, Evans, Hardy & Young, Inc. for header card design and ads for promotions, Larry Del Santo, Lucky Chairman for heading up the annual appeal to the food industry, along with Byron Allumbaugh of Ralphs, Roger Hughes of Hughes Markets, and Everett Dingwell of Certified Grocers, McCracken Brooks of Minneapolis, as pro bono ad agency to develop our new logo and brand identity, Eric Lesin, Ralphs 39 Ambassador (his daughter got him involved and he later became a FFA Board member; Regional Councils formed in New England and Northern California; VISTA volunteers Tom Whalen (2^nd year-Tom will become a full-time merchandiser for FOOD FOR ALL), Michelle Delehanty of San Diego, and Jill Walker-Smith (who will become a life-long friend); Holiday promotions (“Giving Tree”) ideas from volunteers; Community Bank of Redlands sells FOOD FOR ALL cards at teller windows; Waldbaum’s Foodmart sells “Santa Bucks” at their check stands; Ev Foster is honored as the “ultimate FOOD FOR ALL volunteer” for developing the computer programs for all FOOD FOR ALL functions.

 

 

June ’93—Pledge drive created (“Buy FOOD FOR ALL every time you shop”); new look for FOOD FOR ALL designed by McCracken Brooks, our pro bono ad agency; Nestle USA prints a million FOOD FOR ALL cards; celebrities join FOOD FOR ALL honorary campaign committee (Dixie Carter, Mel Harris of Thirty Something, Robert Sean Leonard, Julianne Phillips, Beverly Archer, Ross Becker, Bill Kinison, Steve Allen, Audrey Meadows, Vlade Divacs and A. C. Green of the LA Lakers, Swoozie Kurtz, Lesley Ann Warren, Naomi Judd; FOOD FOR ALL month declared by San Diego and Orange County Boards of Supervisors.

 

As we entered the two year period ending with the celebration of the 10^th anniversary of the founding of FOOD FOR ALL, we were still hopeful that this “idea whose time has come” would catch the imagination of the supermarket industry and its vast array of growers, manufacturers, and suppliers. We were like the proverbial rubber tree plant who had high hopes. We had not given in to the naysayers by any means. But we knew we had a mountain to climb and an obstacle course to run. We had no idea just how difficult the climb would be, given what was going on in the world we had entered.

 

The Food Industry Trade Shows: Milan at GGA & Milo at FMI

I am reminded of a conversation I had at a food industry banquet when I attended the Chicago FMI convention and trade show, where we were invited to exhibit. I happened to sit at a table with some food industry executives. Next to me was a gentleman who identified himself as a lobbyist for a major food company. I was explaining to him why we were at this convention and our hope for expansion and adoption by the entire industry. He listened with evident interest to what I was telling him. After listening to a performance by Kenny Rogers, having had a few glasses of wine and dessert, he leaned over as we were getting ready to depart and said: “I applaud you for what you are trying to do, but I must tell you, you have no idea how many forces there are that are opposed to everything you stand for.”

It took a few more years for his comment to sink in. I have never forgotten that encounter.

FOOD FOR ALL ERA 14: I Can’t Believe This All Happened

“How do you feel about receiving money from a company that sells tobacco products?”

I had barely sat down in this meeting with the Corporate Contributions Director of Phillip Morris Companies, her assistant director, and a consultant they hired to help them on funding strategies. I took my time responding: “Truthfully, I’m not sure and will have to do some talking with our board and grassroots supporters before I can answer that question.” Compounding the decision I had to make was my own 35 year history as a smoker, and then less than 10 years as a recovering nicotine addict. This meeting would prove to be a watershed event in the FOOD FOR ALL journey. It came about because of our growing support among food manufacturing corporations, attention we were attracting among retailer supermarket companies, and the number of times we were bumping into the Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger (FICAH), which conducted a Holiday seasonal fundraiser alongside our year-round program at grocers’ check stands.

It turns out that Phillip Morris did not only sell cigarettes. It also owned Kraft General Foods and a number of other food companies, and was attempting to re-brand itself in the public’s perception. At a second meeting, after I had done my consulting with our Boards and a sampling of our stakeholders, having received responses running from “This could be a problem with our hunger activist supporters” to “Take the money and run,” I decided that there was no way to untangle Phillip Morris from food products, at least in the mind of supermarket operators. So I said to Richard Brown, newly appointed as Director of Corporate Contributions of PM: “We are looking for substantial support over the next three years to fund our expansion nation-wide.”

“How much would be required?” was his immediate response.

“About two million dollars” I spat out without hesitation.

“Well, our company is certainly capable of that—not that we are going to do it.”

The result of these meetings was a commitment from Phillip Morris Companies for a grant of $75,000 to fund a feasibility study, with a further promise of support, up $150,000, perhaps more, pending a positive result of the study. Not exactly what I had in mind. We already had our expansion plan. To further muck things up, much of the initial grant had to go to a consultant of their choosing to conduct the study. This would put us in a holding pattern for almost a year while Bill Leider, our newly acquired planning consultant, interviewed a smattering of food industry executives, hunger agency folk, and our stakeholders. It involved a couple of trips Bill and I made, one to Washington, DC.

Bill Leider was an interesting man, short, about 5’1” I guessed. His office was in Marina del Rey, so I assumed he must have been very successful. He was active in a prominent Vietnam Veterans organization, and took me to the Vietnam Memorial while we were in Washington. As a former protester against the Vietnam War in my post-seminary days, this was an emotional experience for me, seeing all those tens of thousands of names sacrificed for us. We also stopped in at the Lincoln Memorial and as we were leaving he stopped me. “Look down at your feet,” he said. “The stone you are standing on is the one Martin Luther King was standing on for his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” It was one of those moments my mind was stopped and I couldn’t speak. I just thanked him.

The culmination of Bill’s work for us, following his written report, was a three-day strategic planning retreat with about 30 from our Board of Directors, representatives of our Advisory Boards, and a number of stakeholders. It was paid for by Phillip Morris, attended by Richard Brown and PM’s consultant, was facilitated by two of our old ICA colleagues, John Oyler from our Funds Distributions Advisory Board and Gordon Harper, now living in Seattle, and resulted in a five-year strategic plan for FOOD FOR ALL expanding into several more cities. There were many things I came to appreciate about our relationship with Bill Leider, and with Richard Brown. But I have to say that we could have used Phillip Morris Company’s grant money a lot more effectively had they just funded our expansion plan and gave us a grant to implement it. We were ready and events were moving fast in the food industry and in to charitable giving world.

Even so, when I look back through the quarterly newsletters that were produced, and the annual reports for the years from August of 1991 to July 1993, I find myself in a state of awe. This period in the FOOD FOR ALL journey unfolded as though it was part of a mysterious, inexplicable happening that I was not even part of, and yet I knew I was in the midst of.

Our annual report for fiscal year 1992-93 indicated that we had 1200 supermarkets in four states on two coasts participating, customer contributions in this “first of a kind” program reached $850,000 and had now surpassed $4 million since its beginning in 2 supermarkets in 1986. Our grant programs were aimed at four strategies to address hunger: alleviating basic needs, fostering self-reliance, community-based organizations working on root causes of hunger, promoting grassroots educating and involvement in hunger issues. 330 grants were made totaling $523,152 aimed at domestic hunger, and $197,826 to 22 sustainable development projects, primarily in Asia, Africa, and South and Central America.

Corporate support continued to grow, now numbering 45 food companies, some of them engaging in special promotions with us and participating supermarkets. Eight companies and individuals were donating goods and services. Our Board of Directors numbered 14, with a like number on the Food Industry Advisory Board and Funds Distribution Advisory Board. All of this was staffed by 8 persons in our national office in Redlands, regional one-person offices in Southern California, Northern California, New England, and 6 VISTA (domestic Peace Corps) volunteers made possible by a grant.

These two years leading up to FOOD FOR ALL’s tenth year are so packed with accomplishments and set-backs, elation and deflation, that I will reserve my attempt to describe and illuminate this period in the next installment of this amazing story. Don’t’ touch that dial!

FOOD FOR ALL ERA 13: SoCal Here We Come!

If I had known what lay ahead, would I have been as bold? More cautious? Perhaps more humble. In the sixth year of FOOD FOR ALL's incorporation as a "nonprofit public benefit corporation committed to ending hunger," our fiscal year 1990-91, I believed there was a window of opportunity for establishing our point-of-sale program as an ongoing partnership: supermarkets, shoppers, and anti-hunger agencies. How long this window would remain open was a big question. And how could we sustain the grassroots volunteer support systems we knew it would take? The FOOD FOR ALL approach was still new and attracting interest. The fact that we were involving customers and store employees as volunteers, reaching out to local and international anti-hunger forces to help determine how best to apply grant funds to make a real impact on hunger, and bringing diverse people and groups together to create more effective strategies for ensuring food security, made us stand out as more than just another charity doing good things. But were we going to be sustainable over time?

FOOD FOR ALL was becoming known for its highly participative approach. Our board of directors held two annual planning retreats each year, which included staff as well as key stakeholders, utilizing the group facilitation methods (now ToP for Technology of Participation) learned from our years on the staff of the Institute of Cultural Affairs. These same methods were used in our volunteer training of Local Grant Boards each year, and the dozens of "hunger forums" held geographically. In the fall of 1990 our Funds Distribution Advisory Board sponsored a "Sharing Approaches That Work" conference, which brought together and highlighted the work of 24 nonprofits working to "break the cycle of poverty." Over 200 persons attended the conference, featuring well-known author Lisbeth Schorr as keynote speaker, and actress Beverly Archer as MC. FOOD FOR ALL was becoming "known" among a growing but still limited audience. Could we get the attention of the one audience we needed to sustain the program: the food industry, retailers, manufacturers, and distributors?

 

The fall of 1990 kicks off our "Southern Californians Reaching Out to End Hunger" campaign, to feature endorsements of religious leaders, media promotions and public service announcements by celebrities, and a renewed appeal to supermarket chains. We received two encouraging responses, first from Ralphs Grocery Company to install the program in September, then a surprise phone call from Jack Brown: "Milan, this is Jack Brown. I think we need to talk." Stater Bros. Markets began our program with their opening of a new store in Redlands, at a press conference, arranged by our staff marketing guy, Scott Christiansen. Both Ralphs and Stater Bros. made it easy by designing, manufacturing and installing the displays. This added 250 stores within the first few months and got the campaign off to a flying start. By March of 1991 both Quality Foods International (Market Basket) and Hughes Markets were on board which added another 110 stores and surpassed the one thousandth supermarket carrying our program.

 

With Byron Allumbaugh of Ralphs and Jack Brown of Stater Bros.

It was a milestone year in more than one way. Lucky Stores customer contributions passed the one million dollar mark. Four executives of major supermarket chains came together to personally sign an appeal letter to their food industry counterparts for support of FOOD FOR ALL, resulting in a breakthrough in industry participation and nearly $200,000 to underwrite our expansion. We were able to make grants of $650,000 during the year to hundreds of local hunger programs and 18 international projects. Our staff grew to 13 during the year, including regional directors for each of our three regions, Southern California, Northern California, and New England. Our 13 member Board of Directors now included five from the food industry. I should probably not neglect to mention that our board finally determined that I had proved my worth as a full-time volunteer for enough years and should be paid a salary. Retroactively? Just kidding.

So, to summarize an exciting and bold year:

· Southern California, 731 supermarkets, $482,000, 200 plus local organizations helped

· Northern California, 270 supermarkets, $185,500, 65 grants made

· New England, 61 supermarkets, $80,500, 41 local grants made

· 18 international development projects funded in Africa and South Central America totaling $151,000

· 33 food industry companies provide financial support

· nine celebrities provide support of the campaign including Vlade Divac of the LA Lakers, Bob Golic of the (then) LA Raiders, Jaime Harrin, the Spanish voice of the LA Dodgers

· Inkind services provided by Grey Advertising of LA and Lillick & Charles, a San Francisco law firm.

It was amazing who was responding to the FOOD FOR ALL message, and who was willing to help us promote it. As I look back through the annual reports and newsletters we produced during this period, I stand in awe of what grew out of this simple idea that Linda came up with back in 1985. Seems like a hundred years ago.

It makes me wonder what could be in store for us. What will be the legacy of FOOD FOR ALL?

FOOD FOR ALL ERA 12: California Dreaming

I never thought of myself as a merchandiser. In fact, I didn’t know the first thing about what went on at supermarket check stands, except you put your grocery items on the belt and the checker rang them up and put them in your bag. As I began to learn about all the products that were placed in view of customers right there at the ‘point of sale’ and tried to design a display rack that would fit in to each setting, I realized that somebody had to install them and maintain them. That is the job of the merchandiser, either store employees or someone from outside paid by a food distributor.

I also discovered that the space at the check stand is the most expensive and sought after spot in a supermarket and we were asking retailers to give us that real estate gratis. But we had no budget to hire people to do the installation and maintenance of our displays. And I soon discovered that store employees had lots of tasks to occupy their attention. It was not going to be realistic to expect them to take care of re-stocking our FOOD FOR ALL cards. We had to devise a way to support our program. This was my job and apparently no one else was going to take it on--the ultimate on-the-job training program.

Not that I was unwilling. I had designed the very first displays, clunky heavy metal jobs with adjustable brackets to fit on top of the magazine and candy racks. The cards had dye cut oblong holes that hung on removable metal pegs. The racks cost us about seven dollars each, which is fine when we had about a dozen supermarkets involved. But now we were faced with supplying a few hundred supermarkets with an average of 10 check stands. Fortunately I had acquired some friends in the industry who helped design some more appropriate racks which were attractive and also cheaper. And we were hoping that retailers would step up and manufacture their own racks to hold our cards. I don’t remember who came up with the ingenious idea to make a simple white-coated wire with three pegs that could be attached with two metal screws to a magazine rack, but he was a genius in my book. Then the cards only needed a small hole drilled in the top center of the cards and they would hang just as easily as our old cards. That meant we had to have all new cards printed. We hadn’t paid Lucky Stores for the last million cards that their billing department kept sending us invoices for.

With this as our credential, we charged ahead with expansion plans. What was in our favor, at the beginning of our fiscal year 1989-90, was a phenomenon that would impact our future, for good and ill, called “mergers and acquisitions,” a trend in the food industry that would be accelerating in the coming years. Lucky Stores was in the process of being acquired by American Stores, Inc., based in Salt Lake City, which had already acquired the Alpha Beta chain in Southern California. We approached Alpha Beta at the very beginning of our test program and were placed “under consideration,” as we were by other retailers, including Stater Bros., Vons, Ralphs, Albertson’s, etc. Now, due to some unfathomable twist of fate, we got the go-ahead from Alpha Beta to install FOOD FOR ALL in their 160 stores in Southern California, followed soon after by Lucky Stores Northern California Division’s 153 supermarkets (we had actually clandestinely got their 7 San Leandro stores to test the program in preparation for this expansion).

I already mentioned that I was not a merchandiser. So I wondered, “How were we to install our displays in another 400 supermarkets by Christmas 1989?” To our good fortune, Mike Mathers, an Alpha Beta executive, stepped up to the plate and arranged for the printing of a million FOOD FOR ALL cards, manufacturing of racks, and installing displays in all of their stores. Not that we were off the hook. We had to arrange for the packing of 160 boxes with all the displays and cards to be picked up and distributed to their stores. So we just recruited about 20 volunteers, asked my Mentone Congregational Church if we could use the church building, and one Saturday packed up all the boxes to be picked up and delivered. We were now operational in another 160 stores.

  

The installation of the program in 153 northern California Lucky Stores was not so easy. As I mentioned earlier, I was not a merchandiser. Nevertheless, I found myself in my 1970 VW bus, loaded with displays and FOOD FOR ALL cards, driving the I-5 to northern California, personally installing displays and FOOD FOR ALL cards in Lucky Stores, sometimes in the middle of the night (many supermarkets were open 24 hours). I loved it! San Francisco was my “home turf.” I “left my heart in San Francisco” many years before. My VW bus made it through many merchandising trips during this and the coming years. I was still a full time volunteer, but I had no complaints.

Don’t get me wrong. While I was having all this fun, our people were working too. Linda was writing grants and recruiting and training volunteers to sustain the grassroots programs that undergirded our program expansion. Diane Adams, our Coordinator of Volunteers was pulling off a World Food Day event involving 2000 volunteers at our participating supermarkets. Pepsi and Louis Rich supported the promotion, as well as several California radio stations. In New England, Walbaum’s Foot Mart continued its support by giving all proceeds from their annual food show to FOOD FOR ALL, and involving their employees in promotions. We were able to keep the program alive with a part time staff person and donated office space in Hartford.

By the end of our fiscal year in June of 1989-90, 650 supermarkets were participating; grants to anti-hunger agencies surpassed $1 million; there were 26 local grant committees; hundreds of local organizations, and 14 international projects were grant recipients. Ten Consensus for Action Think Tanks on Hunger were held (of the 40 over three years), resulting in new strategies to address hunger.

Five food manufacturing companies had come forward in support of the FOOD FOR ALL program. Most notable of these was Hunt-Wesson, due to the connection with Frank Quevedo, Director of Corporate Relations, who would become a significant member of our Board of Directors and a good friend in the coming years.

At the fourth annual meeting of FOOD FOR ALL, attended by 35 persons, the stage was set for a major effort to reach out to the food industry and the public. This was followed by a January 1990 planning retreat of our Board of Directors and advisors, at which a campaign was announced to extend FOOD FOR ALL to all retailers in Southern California. This was to include the media, celebrity endorsements, and grassroots education.

During the fiscal year 1989-90, our Board of Directors was increased to 12 members, including Beverly Archer, actress, and John Benner, Senior Vice President of Lucky Stores, who is to become a trusted friend and eventually Chairman of our Board of Directors. Others from the food industry are Lynda Trelut of Nob Hill Foods, Bill Christy of Certified Grocers, Dan Lescoe of Waldbaum’s Food Mart, and Bob Inadomi of JonSons Markets. Neill Richards, an original supporter and member of our Funds Distribution Advisory Board, as well as Director of Hunger Programs of the United Church of Christ, also joined our Board.

The Food Industry Advisory Board of nine added Frank Quevedo of Hunt-Wesson; our Funds Distribution Advisory Board grew to 13, and the Public Relations Advisory board had 11 members.

FOOD FOR ALL staff held at eight (again, plus yours truly, still a full-time volunteer). Our most notable staff addition during the year was Lisa Dewey, a young and enthusiastic woman who came to us because she wanted to make a difference. Lisa was hired to coordinate our newly conceived supermarket employee involvement program and Southern California store expansion effort. This was one of those initiatives that took longer to bear fruit than we anticipated. Lisa left us after a year to go on to a successful teaching career, but many of the connections she made produced results in the form of supermarket employees who became Store Ambassadors and chairs of Local Grant committees for several years to come. We remain close friends with Lisa and her husband to this day. This has been one of the side benefits of the thirteen years of our involvement in FOOD FOR ALL, that we have maintained these friendships through the years.

So a good deal of my time during our fiscal year 1989-90 was devoted to learning the merchandising trade: many hours, days, and weeks on the road in my trusty 1970 VW bus, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of a rainstorm, once in the middle of a snowstorm, driving from supermarket to supermarket, with just my Thomas Bros. map book (we did not have GPS or cell phones). Arriving at a store, checking in with the store manager, working around the checkers and customers, beginning to install a display only to be told “you need to move to another aisle—we need to open this lane.” This was all part of the on-the-job training experience of a FOOD FOR ALL merchandiser.

The learning did not stop with installation and maintenance. When one of our store ambassadors would call with a frantic “All the FOOD FOR ALL displays are gone,” we discovered that supermarket chains had a schedule of total replacement of front ends. When this happened, store managers were notified, a crew arrived in the night and replaced everything—except the FOOD FOR ALL displays. After a couple of years we became adept at keeping in closer touch with store operations personnel, to try to get there in time to salvage our precious donation cards.

Another lesson we learned early in the year: The Alpha Beta rack designer came up with his own idea—a ‘spinner’ rack with our cards hanging on rotating hooks. The trouble was that many stores’ check stands were very close to the front entrances with sliding doors. On windy days we would often find our cards ‘spinning’ right off the racks. Then employees would solve the problem by wrapping a plastic grocery bag around the cards. Problem solved—theirs, not ours.

Thankfully, while I was learning to be a merchandiser, I had people who were continuing to build the support systems for the next phase of FOOD FOR ALL. Stay tuned.

FOOD FOR ALL ERA 11: Going North

We were young. We were bold. We were enthusiastic.  We were filled with conviction that the world needed FOOD FOR ALL. We were also perhaps a little crazy. But slowing down was not in our DNA. I believe it was at a California Grocers Convention in the Spring of 1988 that I met Lynda Trelut, this attractive young woman with the silvery hair, who happened to be Vice President of CGA and also VP of marketing in her family-owned supermarket chain, Nob Hill Foods, based in Gilroy, the “garlic capital of the world.” Lynda agreed to join our Food Industry Advisory Board and also to convince her brother, the President of Nob Hill, and the rest of her family, to take on this upstart anti-hunger program. This put us in 22 more stores scattered throughout the east and south San Francisco Bay Area, and allowed us to pick up eight more independents in the same region.

  

Fifty-three new supermarkets were added to the FOOD FOR ALL family of retail stores committed to making an impact on hunger during our fiscal year 1988-89. In addition to Nob Hill Foods, Lucky added their 16 Las Vegas stores and we installed displays in 15 more independent markets. This made possible grants of over $392,000 to several hundred more local and international programs to fight hunger during the year.

  

Promotional help from Nob Hill Foods at all of their stores as they introduced FOOD FOR ALL to their employees and customers through a matching contributions promotion in a kickoff week of November 1988, along with Lucky Stores teaming with KABC Los Angeles at Thanksgiving and KXTZ Las Vegas for a February Nevada kickoff, and Waldbaum’s Food Mart’s contest for employees and donating all the proceeds from their annual Hartford food and nutrition show in March ’89, kept FOOD FOR ALL in front of customers’ minds and hearts, and donations continuing to grow for local and international anti-hunger efforts.

  

The Food Industry Advisory Board added several new members. In addition to Bill Christy of Certified Grocers, Lynda Trelut of Nob Hill Foods, and Dan Lescoe of Waldbaum’s Food Mart, Bill Yingling, President of Lucky Stores Southern California agreed to join. Bill was the guy who almost kicked us out of their stores after the initial two-store test in 1986, and now became one of our enthusiastic cheerleaders.

Another important addition to our structure was the formation of a Public Relations Advisory Board, made up of persons from advertising, food industry marketing people, a handful of politicians, and media folk. This allowed us to go to busy people for help when we needed it, but not have to ask them to serve on another time-consuming board. Karen Sturgeon and Bonnie Lewis of Lucky, Mayors Carole Beswick of Redlands and Susan Hammer of San Jose, Congressmen Jerry Lewis and George Brown, and Beverly Archer, an actress who had become acquainted with FOOD FOR ALL at the South Pasadena store where she shopped, and joined our San Gabriel Valley Local Grant board. Beverly will be familiar to those who watched the syndicated Mama’s Family TV show, and as the tough sergeant “Gunny” on Major Dad. She will go on to serve on our Board of Directors for a couple of years and do a TV spot for us, as well as convince Vicky Lawrence, Mama of Mama’s Family, to sit for a spot promoting FOOD FOR ALL . . .

Beverly Archer with TV production crew and FOOD FOR ALL founders and Scott Christiansen, FFA PR Director 2nd from right.

Our staff grew to eight during this fiscal year (plus yours truly as full-time volunteer), and included a much needed Director of Funds Distribution, as well as a New England Regional Director. Sing Baker, a highly skilled local housewife with a degree in Social Work, who wanted to get back into the workforce, took on our grant programs with a loving dedication which left an indelible mark on our young organization. Diane Adams moved from volunteer to staff as Coordinator of Volunteers.

     

Of all the challenges of growing an organization, none proved more difficult than growing the staff. I consider us lucky in that respect. It is so easy to make poor hiring decisions and it is so clear in hindsight that you have made them. We were fortunate that the right people appeared, it seemed, at just the right time. I remember all the wrong decisions as for the most part mine. Not that things could have worked out differently than they did, but acting more quickly might have lessened some of the self-inflicted pain we were to endure. But that is for a later chapter of the FOOD FOR ALL story. For now I will share only the lesson learned by quoting some management guru whose name escapes me: “Hire slowly and fire quickly!”

It was during the fiscal year ending with June 1989 that FOOD FOR ALL established its identity as a force for bringing together new resources and directing them toward addressing causes as well as effects of hunger. Here is the mission statement that guided us:

“FOOD FOR ALL is a nonprofit public benefit corporation committed to ending hunger. Its primary purposes are to generate and distribute new resources for effective programs addressing the crises, the effects, and the causes of hunger; increase grassroots involvement in efforts to end hunger; and encourage new strategies to empower the movement toward a hunger-free society and world.”

  

We were positioning FOOD FOR ALL to gain the support needed from the food industry to make buying ‘food for all’ a part of everyone’s food buying habit. Yet to date only three food manufacturers had stepped forward in support of expanding the program. In the President’s Message from our annual report I tried to make the case:

“Almost everyone agrees that FOOD FOR ALL’s potential is unlimited, but we have a huge job ahead of us in developing greater public awareness and in enlisting the support of the entire food industry. This is going to take every one of us going out of our way to talk to friends and neighbors, writing letters, speaking to groups, and committing ourselves to buying a FOOD FOR ALL card every week! And most importantly, we must all be thinking together about what is needed in this country to ultimately eradicate hunger.”

We were growing in many ways during 1988-89. It was in large part the result of careful and thoughtful planning, as well as the good fortune to be riding a wave of public interest in the issue of hunger. Linda and I having spent 10 years on the staff of the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), where we learned most of the methods for building a grassroots volunteer organization, gave us the tools and the courage we needed to even think about growing FOOD FOR ALL into a nationwide program. Georgianna McBurney, who had been a volunteer with the ICA during the same years as we were on staff, headed up our Funds Distribution Advisory Board and helped develop our Think Tanks on Hunger. John Oyler, a long-time staff member of ICA who had worked for many years in international village development projects, joined that board and gave many hours, along with other ICA staff members, in facilitating these Think Tanks, which were part of what came to be known as our Consensus for Action program.

  

Above Left: Georgianna McBurney on lower right with Funds Distribution Advisory Board members Darryl Brock, Mike Hayes, Gianna Hochstein, Neill Richards, Aaron Zerah, Jean Faria Walker.  Above Right: John Oyler of the ICA facilitating a Think Tank on hunger.

During this fiscal year 10 of these events were held in Southern California and a number of volunteers were trained in methods to build consensus so that they could be more effective in helping develop long range strategies for addressing the hunger issue. By the end of June 1989 there were thirteen active local grant boards in Southern California, three in Northern California, and three in New England.

An important component of our volunteer program was the engagement of customers and store employees in educating and motivating the food buying public. Our “Adopt-A-Store” program and Speakers’ Bureau brought many more individuals to an awareness that they could do something about a big problem just by remembering to include a FOOD FOR ALL card with their grocery purchases.

  

Helen Anderson, an early FOOD FOR ALL Adopter

A simple presentation was developed that could be given at churches, service clubs and other group settings, composed of a set of boxes that showed what made for living a productive life. The bottom tier of boxes were food, shelter, transportation, and a job. The presenter then demonstrated what happens when one or more of the boxes was removed. If a job is lost, for example, soon it may be more difficult to pay for housing. This may also mean health insurance goes away. One serious illness may take away the family’s ability to pay for housing. Then the family can no longer afford to buy food. It didn’t take long for group members to see that the issue of hunger was much more complex than they had thought, and how anyone could find themselves in the same situation.

  

Diane Adams, Coordinator of Volunteers, Making a Presentation

FOOD FOR ALL was poised for a major expansion in California by the fall of 1989. All of our internal support structures were in place. We were gaining momentum. Shoppers were responding. There was increasing interest among retail grocers. Our small but growing army of volunteers, now numbering in the hundreds, gave us confidence.

We still had to break through the wall of resistance of the massive and complex food industry, which had not as yet recognized the value of a united effort to address hunger, nor were we certain it ever would. The competition for profits was so fierce that it was difficult to even get the attention of the decision-makers in these big corporations.

But we were not going to give up without the old college try.