December 4, 2011 | Read Time: 7 minutes
Chicago
This fall, the Jewelers’ Building, an imposing Art Deco building here, was bathed in orange light to mark Hunger Action Month and call attention to the mission of one of its tenants, a national network of more than 200 food banks.
For Feeding America, the umbrella group that represents food banks, the first-time display of color was a coming-out party of sorts, as the once-quiet organization has transformed itself into a fund-raising powerhouse.
Behind those efforts is a new leader, Vicki B. Escarra, who left the top marketing job at Delta Airlines to take over the charity in 2006.
Food-bank leaders nationwide say Ms. Escarra’s leadership is a key reason that even amid the economic downturn, Feeding America will manage to increase contributions to nearly $115-million in the fiscal year that ends in June, compared with $33-million in her first year.
What’s more, the group has raised nearly half of the $500-million it hopes to garner in a five-year drive that started in 2009.
The organization has also increased pounds of donated food by 57 percent.
Such gains enabled food banks to aid 37 million people last year, a number that has grown by 46 percent in the past five years.
To be sure, the economic turmoil the nation has endured during Ms. Escarra’s tenure has made it easier for groups that provide basic necessities to make their case for donations.
But food-bank veterans say her decisions to transform the charity’s image, restructure its fund-raising staff, and make other changes has enabled the nonprofit organization to reach out to a broad range of national companies and wealthy Americans who had never previously paid much attention to food banks.
A Better Name
One of Ms. Escarra’s first and boldest moves was to champion a name change at the group, which had been known by some variation of the name Second Harvest for more than 30 years.
Anne Goodman, president of the Cleveland Foodbank, says that Ms. Escarra realized right away that Second Harvest’s name was a stumbling block to fund raising because it doesn’t say what the group does.
“It takes guts to say, ‘I’m going to invest the assets of a charity in marketing,’ but she had the vision to do it, and it paid off,” Ms. Goodman says.
The new name helped persuade many companies that they wanted to be associated with an organization providing relief from the growing hunger problem in the United States.
More than 70 companies now give at least $150,000 annually in cash support, up from 31 before the name change. Today companies donate more than $33-million in cash annually, up from nearly $7-million.
Expanded Services
Beyond promoting the new name, Ms. Escarra has worked to help food banks become more efficient and expand their services to vulnerable Americans.
Many of those efforts have been underwritten by big corporate gifts, including a five-year pledge by Wal-Mart last year to provide 1.1 billion pounds of donated food.
Wal-Mart has also given $20-million this year to pay for refrigerated trucks and other efforts to help food banks better distribute products.
The retail giant Target is another big supporter, providing millions of pounds of food and $4.5-million to help local food banks feed children.
The Maryland Food Bank, in Baltimore, has received three Target grants totaling $200,000 to expand the food pantries it operates in public schools, where needy parents can choose grocery items when they pick up their children.
“As parents come to access food, they are also connecting with their kids’ education,” says Deborah Flateman, chief executive of the Maryland Food Bank.
With the Target grants, the food bank now operates pantries in 140 schools, up from 40. The expansion has helped persuade other donors to give because they like the combination of pushing education and nutrition, says Ms. Flateman.
Nontraditional Donors
While Wal-Mart, Target, and other companies that sell food have long supported food banks, Ms. Escarra has managed to greatly expand donations from other types of businesses, including pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial-services companies.
She helped persuade Morgan Stanley last year to commit more than $5-million in support over two years to expand a Feeding America program that fills the backpacks of needy kids with nutritious food before they leave school and return home for the weekend.
Morgan Stanley also helped Feeding America raise its profile by paying $1.2-million for a series of advertisements that appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal during the last three months of 2010.
“We wanted to bring attention to this issue among an audience where Feeding America traditionally has not had an opportunity to promote its work,” says Joan Steinberg, president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation.
Fund-Raising Powerhouse
Ms. Escarra also actively helps food banks raise money from local donors.
She says she spends nearly 70 percent of her working hours traveling outside Chicago, largely to work on fund raising. For instance, she hopped a flight to Tulsa last month to attend a dinner to honor Sara Waggoner, the outgoing chief executive at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.
In her two hours in Tulsa, Ms. Escarra spent half the time doing interviews with local reporters and the rest of the evening wooing donors at the dinner.
Just before the event, the food bank had raised $167,000, says Ms. Waggoner. “Vicki asked folks to make an additional gift, and we raised $223,000, the biggest amount we’ve ever raised with a single event.”
Ms. Escarra has also worked with local food banks to identify donors who might be interested in supporting national hunger-fighting efforts.
For example, the charity successfully appealed to Dennis L. Jilot, chairman of STR Holdings, an Enfield, Conn., company that makes solar products, for a $2.5-million gift to be split among Feeding America and food banks in Nevada and Wisconsin, where his family has roots.
Corporate Satisfaction
One reason Feeding America has been able to pull off such big increases in corporate gifts and donations from wealthy people is that it is spending a lot more money to seek donations than ever before.
Soon after Ms. Escarra’s arrival, a board member was so impressed, he mentioned the new chief executive’s work to the Lincy Foundation, the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian’s philanthropy.
One day Ms. Escarra received a call from three Lincy officials who invited her to submit a multimillion-dollar proposal to improve the food-bank network over the next five years.
Since then, Feeding America has gotten $62-million from Lincy, some of which has been used to hire more fund raisers.
After getting the infusion, Ms. Escarra says, “we began a strategy of fund raising rather than it being an afterthought.”
A key change was reorganizing the way Feeding America seeks corporate support.
The charity previously assigned one group of staff members to seek outright corporate gifts and another to handle marketing deals with businesses that wanted to tie donations to product sales. But that “drove companies crazy,” says Amy Franze, Feeding America’s chief philanthropy officer.
Ms. Franze combined the two corporate divisions into one and assigned several fund raisers to serve as the primary contact for a handful of corporate supporters. As a result, Ms. Franze says, “corporate satisfaction is now much higher.”
Feeding America has expanded the overall fund-raising staff from five to 30, including several new major gift officers, one person to focus on bequests, and three to conduct research on potential donors, a job that had been handled by one person in the past.
With help from a fund-raising consultant, Feeding America has also started a new project to help fund raisers form personal contacts with donors who give $1,000 or more.
Worries About Cuts
While Feeding America has achieved record increases in private donations in the past five years, Ms. Escarra and other food-bank leaders worry about cuts in government support.
Food banks get about a quarter of their fruits, vegetables, and other items through a federal program that buys excess goods from farmers and manufacturers, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the program isn’t needed now to meet its original purpose: making up for low food prices.
The Atlanta Community Food Bank, which has received more than 30 percent of its food from the federal program in recent years, is already feeling the pinch.
“We are down right now by about 40 percent in commodities, and we are working twice as hard because demand is still high,” says Bill Bolling, the executive director. “It’s harder now than it was early in the recession.”
To Ms. Escarra, such challenges are just one more illustration of how complicated it is to run Feeding America.
At Delta, she says, she faced many big challenges, especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when a third of the company’s planes were grounded and “we were bleeding money.” But this job is tougher.
“It is a misnomer that the nonprofit sector is easier,” says Ms. Escarra. “It’s more rewarding than the corporate sector but every bit as challenging.”
