How City Harvest’s Leader Learned About Hunger, Community Involvement, and Creating Change

ENTRY LEVEL

Julia A. Erickson

Age: 43

First job: Development officer, Bronx Frontier Development

Corporation, New York

Current job: Executive director, City Harvest, New York

I graduated from Smith College in 1980 with a degree in government, and then, after a year of graduate school, I decided I needed to get some real-life experience. At the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation we focused on, among other things, community gardening and nutritional education in the schools and for the elderly. In that job, I saw that involving the people who are affected by a problem or invested in a community is essential in developing and implementing effective programs. I also found that sometimes people in need can benefit greatly from partnerships with people from “the outside” who care, who can bring with them expertise and various resources.

In my role raising money and developing programs, I interacted with program staff, finance staff, donors, board members, and the external world — and got to see how interconnected everything was. Good programs could raise money, good press would help raise money so we could do good programs, etc. So every person was important, from the receptionist who was the first contact many had with the organization to the executive director who represented us publicly to the program staff members who actually delivered the services. We couldn’t function without each and every one of them. I learned that management has to be holistic. You have to look at the entire organization, and not think that it’s just the program or finance that’s important. Everyone, from receptionist to CEO, should feel they have a critical role to play.

I also observed firsthand the transformative power of staff training and development. For example, I saw someone whose life completely turned around when she learned to use the computer. She went from no self-esteem to taking charge of her life, because she mastered that skill and it became important in the life of the organization.

After about three years there I worked with a fund-raising consultant for a while, only to realize that while I loved the organizations I was helping, I was starting to see dollar signs on everyone’s foreheads. Also, it was frustrating not to be able to personally see the proposals through to implementation. I wanted to be in an organization again. So I thought I would try my hand at managing, and not just raising money. From 1984 to 1990, I worked at the Community Service Society of New York, one of the oldest antipoverty charities in the city, as the assistant director in the department of community support, handling budgets, human resources, reporting, doing program monitoring, and providing management and fund-raising assistance to community-based organizations. That’s where I really learned the nuts and bolts of management.

In 1990 I began to work for the city’s Department of Employment. I really never made enough money while I was working for CSS and for the city, but I had always loved to cook, and I had friends who were caterers, so I started moonlighting as a prep cook. Then I got a job with the Food Emporium stores on the Upper West Side, selling gourmet cookware and handing out free samples of food. It was an interesting exposure to the problem of hunger. Homeless men and women, young and old, would come in to get the free samples, and then they’d come back for more. This was in the early ‘90s, and homelessness had started to decline, but not on the Upper West Side. Single-room-occupancy buildings in the area started disappearing, as the transformation into very expensive housing continued. There was also a lot of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and the Upper West Side was where most of them ended up.

I ended up joining City Harvest in 1994. Since 1982, City Harvest has gathered excess food from area restaurants, hotels, bakeries, manufacturers, and grocery stores and delivered it to the city’s emergency-food programs. City Harvest now helps feed the hungry through more than 500 community agencies. It has combined my desire to run something myself — after watching bosses and thinking I could do it better — and my love of food. We’ve expanded over the years from one station wagon to 13 delivery trucks, delivering food mostly to food pantries, soup kitchens, day-care programs or senior-citizen centers, most of which are founded by, run by, and based in the communities where the people live.

Since September 11 in particular we’ve seen a huge decrease in the amount of food — a total decline of about two million pounds — from all of our food sources. But we’ve been able to get more food from other parts of the region, and other parts of the country. Sometimes a manufacturer isn’t able to give food away in its home community, so often they come to us and choose to work with us.

The heart of incompetence is not caring. There are some people who will say, well, it doesn’t matter if the food they donate is moldy or stale — “Why, they’re hungry people, they’re poor, they’ll take anything.” No. These are human beings, just like us. It’s about dignity: Helping people develop a sense of self-worth. We’re about excellence, and providing for our customers.

My dad is a Lutheran minister, and I grew up in a household with a sense of responsibility to one’s community and a sense of mission that what we do in life can and should mean something. I need to know that what I’m doing is making a difference in other people’s lives. One of the things I always got from my parents is that it is important to take pride in what we do, and to do it very well. Well, many people don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do things well. When I worked in employment training for the city, we were “teaching people to fish, rather than giving them fish.” OK, so now I’m giving people fish, rather than teaching them to fish. But if they’re hungry, they’re not going to be able to fish in the first place.

Nutrition is incredibly important for our future. It’s a business imperative. And I saw in the South Bronx that when kids were taught healthy recipes that they could make themselves, their whole eating habits changed. Change is possible with the simplest of things. — As told to Janet Tate

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