Tough Words to Swallow

A new book by the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen offers blunt criticism of the nonprofit world

It is midmorning on a Thursday, and Robert Egger can relax a bit. His trainees at D.C. Central Kitchen, the job-skills

and food program in Washington that Mr. Egger founded 15 years ago, are nearly done converting restaurant and catering-house leftovers into thousands of meals for the hungry.

As he sits in his cramped, six-foot-square office — the cinder-block walls of which are splashed with pictures of Philip Berrigan, Mother Jones, John Lennon, Bob Marley, and Johnny Rotten, and a sign that reads, “I’ll sleep when I die” — Mr. Egger, 45, steals some time to work his second job: nonprofit provocateur and author of a new book, Begging for Change, published by HarperCollins.

“By any measure, the nonprofit sector is screwed up,” Mr. Egger says, over the hum of the Toastmaster electric heater under his desk. “Every aspect of our society has changed in the past 100 years — art, science, music — but not charity. No one questions the charity formula that Rockefeller and Carnegie concocted 100 years ago, which says that you make money, then give some of it back at the end of the year, or at the end of a career. No one has said to the nonprofit world, ‘Let’s take a timeout and really look at what we’re doing, and at how we’re funded.’”

But as outspoken as Mr. Egger is, does he have an audience beyond the gallery of quasi revolutionaries that hangs on his walls? Will his in-your-face style encourage nonprofit leaders and foundation executives to listen to him — or, more specifically, to the critique he levels at much of the nonprofit world in his book? While Mr. Egger’s gift for gab and the conversational, anecdote-laden style of the book may inspire admiration from outsiders and attention from the news media, he hopes his plain talk will also inspire organizations to change what he sees as ages-old, too-often-unquestioned methods.

Fewer Groups Needed

Mr. Egger’s atypical approach and wired personality may say as much as his message, which may not be all that new to those who have heard complaints about the ways in which organizations are run and financed. He swears a lot. He’s brusque. His tastes in music, which the former nightclub manager says are a driving force in his life and work, aren’t likely to provide the soundtrack to board meetings. (He dedicates Begging for Change to two dead punk rockers, Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone.) His conversations, like some chapters in the book, tend to float upon a colorful stream of consciousness.

Mr. Egger’s often-profane storytelling style is designed to cut through an endless barrage of “philanthrocratese,” or nonprofit jargon. Unlike many nonprofit-management books, Begging for Change relies less on new research and academic investigation and more on Mr. Egger’s experiences running D.C. Central Kitchen and the Washington-area’s branch of the United Way, one of the largest United Ways in the country.

In Begging for Change, Mr. Egger espouses quantum — if not always novel — changes for the nonprofit world, including:

• The reduction by one-quarter of all organizations. Thousands of them that offer duplicate services or make no attempt to solve the causes of the problems they profess to remedy should go out of business so that that the best ones can get more of a share of the available donations and grants, he writes. “Everyone wants to be a general, so they start their own groups, even though the work they may be doing is being done better by groups that already exist,” Mr. Egger says.
• New relationships between grant makers and organizations. Foundations force organizations to waste too much of their time chasing money and then dole out dribs and drabs to a growing number of groups, often at the expense of the operating budgets of effective, well-established organizations, Mr. Egger argues.
• A renewed emphasis on collaboration. Without a strengthening of ties among organizations, “we’ll remain ghettoized by our own causes and we’ll be less effective than we need to be,” Mr. Egger says.
• Playing down the importance of keeping administrative costs low. A better indicator of how a charity manages its money is how much it pays its top executive, Mr. Egger says. “A lot of charitable money goes to pay the inflated salaries of nonprofit leaders,” says Mr. Egger, who accepted pay well below the average of United Way chiefs while running the United Way in Washington. In the book, he lists average salaries of nonprofit leaders and urges donors to compare them with the salaries of the groups they support.
• A reconsideration of the value of capital campaigns. Such major drives can draw millions of dollars away from other local charities, says Mr. Egger.

The slowdown in donations nationwide isn’t due to a haggard economy but to compassion fatigue and to a growing disconnection between charities and donors, Mr. Egger believes. Occasional scandals and overpaid executives, mixed with a sense that charities are using the same old tool with which to raise funds to fix problems that seemingly don’t improve, lead the public to question the effectiveness of organizations.

Re-establishing viability in the eyes of the American public is paramount for charities, he says. “People spent $150-million the day Spiderman came out on DVD, just to see a movie they’d already seen,” Mr. Egger says. “There’s money out there. What you also see out there is an understandable skepticism about nonprofits. Groups need to come up with a plan that shows donors how they’re going to fix things.”

Begging for Change is especially hard on what Mr. Egger deems to be a passionless, entrenched bureaucratic leadership that has forgotten its collective mission and veered away from the public’s interest. “Right now, the nonprofit sector is dominated by people who long ago lost their fire, or are so motivated to raise money that they can’t give guidance or inspiration,” he says. “No wonder the public is skeptical about charities.”

Chiding ‘Nonprofiteers’

While conceding that many older “nonprofiteers” — his often-derisive term for charity leaders — may be incapable of rethinking their management strategies, Mr. Egger says he hopes that a generation of new adults raised on the idea of public service finds some meaning in his ideas.

“I want young people who are into volunteering to read this book and start questioning the nonprofit world as it is now,” he says. “It’s not nearly good enough.”

Mr. Egger, has seen the public’s skepticism firsthand. He was called on to help restore the image of the scandal-plagued United Way of the National Capital Area, in Washington, during a nine-month stint at the organization’s helm in 2002-3. A former leader of that charity, Oral Suer, pleaded guilty in March to stealing $500,000 from the organization during his 27 years there.

Mr. Egger accepted a salary of $85,000 — about 30 percent of that of his predecessor.

Mr. Egger also cut 30 staff positions to balance the books, eliminated the board of directors and formed a new one, helped supervise the writing of an ethics code, and oversaw the doling out of $2.25-million in charitable funds that the United Way had been keeping in reserve. More important, he says, “I took the heat from people who were really pissed off at what had happened at the United Way. It was my job to convince them that everyone in our community needed a strong United Way.”

He can win over a crowd, but he can scare people off too, as he did during his United Way days, Mr. Egger says. There, his far-from-button-down bearing and directness caused some awkwardness, he says. “I went down like a jagged little pill there,” he recalls. “I didn’t wear a suit, so I didn’t get the respect of the business types.”

Turning Waste Into Charity

Mr. Egger’s righteous swagger draws in equal measure on his experiences growing up Catholic and listening to rock ‘n’ roll while living in various parts of the country, he says. The son of a Marine who served three tours of duty in Vietnam, Mr. Egger’s background hardly fits the stereotype of a nonprofit manager.

Born in Florida, Mr. Egger graduated from high school in Springfield, Va., shortly before his parents picked up and moved to Kentucky.

After kicking around for a while, he landed a job in a Washington nightclub. Eventually, he managed several clubs. After locking up at one club one night in 1987, Mr. Egger found himself tagging along with his wife, Claudia, and others from a Washington church group as they headed out on a truck to feed homeless people.

“I had shrunk down in the seat when the church had asked for volunteers,” Mr. Egger remembers. “I had to be corralled.” Daily, the church’s food truck would take meals to people on the street — with no end in sight. “I was immediately struck by the fact that, while they were doing a good thing, they were doing nothing to help people out of the situations they were in. It looked like a form of bondage,” he says.

Meanwhile, Mr. Egger’s friends in the catering and restaurant businesses were lamenting the waste of up to 30 percent of their food at the end of the day. “This was the ‘80s,” Mr. Egger recalls. “It was shrimp and asparagus, and keep it coming. People in the restaurant business mistakenly thought they could get sued for giving away food that made someone sick, so all that stuff ended up in the Dumpster.”

In 1988, Mr. Egger had an epiphany of sorts. He married the concepts of doing more to help homeless people with using food that was about to be thrown away. The idea was similar to what City Harvest, an organization in New York, had been doing. He met with church and civic leaders, urging them to pick up food and to provide training in food service to people on the street who lacked job skills.

“I didn’t have any takers,” he recalls. “No one was interested in a program that took people who were thrown away and food that was being thrown away and made something out of it.”

Inaugural Kickoff

So, he decided to ditch his career and start up his own organization. He immediately ran into the typical charity roadblock: money. After months of appealing to numerous would-be donors and grant makers, he finally received a $25,000 grant from the Charles S. Abel Foundation, in Washington, which allowed him to buy a refrigerator truck. On January 21, 1989, the day following Inauguration Day, Mr. Egger officially opened D.C. Central Kitchen.

Matching one high-profile introduction — the inauguration — with his charity’s genesis pointed up his ability to garner publicity as well as donations. The charity picked up leftovers from inaugural balls that celebrated the beginning of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a move that landed it a lengthy story in The Washington Post and Mr. Egger an award as one of President Bush’s “Points of Light.” The charity rapidly began to pick up grants, including one for $100,000 from the United Parcel Service.

In the past 15 years, Mr. Egger has transformed D.C. Central Kitchen into a $5-million annual operation, one that employs 55 people through its food-for-the-poor program, which feeds children in after-school care, and its for-profit catering business that hires graduates trained while working in the Central Kitchen. The charity provides 4,000 meals daily to Washington-area organizations, and has been copied by similar programs in dozens of cities.

He also founded the Campus Kitchens Project, a spinoff group that uses kitchens in public schools, colleges, and universities to train students how to prepare donated food, which is then delivered to hungry people in each local area. “I noticed that school cafeterias across the country were closed for most of the day,” Mr. Egger explains. “I thought, Why are we busing kids halfway across town to fulfill their community-service requirements when there’s an opportunity for them to serve right there at their schools?”

Analysis Draws Critics

Mr. Egger says he knows that much of his book will be subject to criticism from nonprofit executives and foundation officials who might object to his broadsides and the in-your-face method with which many of them are delivered. The book isn’t specifically prescriptive, Mr. Egger admits. Instead, it is designed to let some fresh air into a stale room.

But not everybody’s willing to breathe it in. Among nonprofit and foundation leaders and researchers who were forwarded parts of the book by The Chronicle, most said that a lack of hard research and an over-reliance on Mr. Egger’s personal anecdotes in Begging for Change proved a bit tiring.

Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, says that Mr. Egger is wrong when he argues that capital campaigns have a draining effect on local fund raising, and the charity world doesn’t need a new way to shut down ineffective groups. Mr. Egger “says that the nonprofit world lacks the invisible hand found in the marketplace that would determine who survives and who doesn’t,” Mr. Carson says. “But that’s just not true. Nonprofit organizations, like nightclubs, either last a long time, or they go out of business.”

Others say that while Mr. Egger makes some good points, the book lacks practical information they can use to run their organizations.

Cindy J. Ryman Yost, executive director of the Lincoln Children’s Museum, in Lincoln, Neb., says that she agrees with Mr. Egger that charities should concentrate more on solving the causes of problems than treating the symptoms of them.

“There’s good information to get a conversation started, to get people moving. But as I read it, I never thought, ‘Hey, here are some ideas I can take to my board that will help us do things better,’” says Ms. Yost.

A few nonprofit leaders were more enthusiastic. Thomas Ferraro, the executive director of Foodlink, in Rochester, N.Y., ordered 150 copies of the book to hand out to members of the emergency food network his group oversees. “Robert says in his unique way that charities need to do more than charity, and that they need to do more with the resources they have,” says Mr. Ferraro.

Businesses and Charities

Despite the disparate opinions of the book, Mr. Egger says his purpose in writing it was to bring organizations closer together, at least in conversation. He once hatched the idea of a “nonprofit congress” that would meet for a week to debate how best to fulfill the missions of various charities.

The idea was reinforced during a trip to India in August, when Mr. Egger studied the country’s colonial history, including the national congress formed by the Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru and others. “For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how 700 million people could be controlled by little more than a handful of British soldiers,” he says. “The answer is they were divided by race, geography, class, religion, culture, language. It was only when they united that they became strong. The nonprofit sector is a lot like that. We’re slaves to our structure. Until we see beyond our little areas and issues, we’ll remain weak.”

Although Mr. Egger envisions a time when traditional philanthropy will become less relevant — and largely will be replaced by businesses that perform charitable acts in the course of providing goods or services — he believes that a cohesive block of nonprofit groups can make some headway into some of society’s most pressing problems.

“Foundations give here, corporations give there, but we’re really not accomplishing as much as we can,” Mr. Egger says. “It’s like we’re scattering seeds. Things are growing, but we could have a garden here.”

ABOUT ROBERT EGGER, AUTHOR OF “BEGGING FOR CHANGE”

Age: 45

Job: President, D.C. Central Kitchen, a charity in Washington that trains homeless people in food preparation and delivers meals to the hungry.

Education: Graduated from Robert E. Lee High School, in Springfield, Va., in 1976.

Experience: Founder of D.C. Central Kitchen, which opened in 1989; interim executive vice president of the United Way of the National Capital Area from September 2002 to June 2003, and founder of Campus Kitchens Project, an organization that uses kitchens in neighborhood schools, colleges, and universities to train people in food service and cook meals for poor people and the elderly.

Books read recently: Nehru: The Invention of India, by Shashi Tharoor, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, by Greg Tate.