Food is the First Step
By Shawn Manley
CEO, Puyallup Food Bank
Windermere Real Estate Community Service Day
The Puyallup Food Bank was nominated for an award through the Puyallup Sumner Chamber of Commerce. One of our staff members asked me immediately after the announcements, “Why would a food bank be nominated in the category of ‘Exceptional Business Advocate’?”
Nonprofits are usually nominated for things like “Culture Hero,” “Community Builder,” or most obviously, “Outstanding Nonprofit.” Someone who sees our unique model and ethos recognizes our commitment to commerce. Why?
We believe every client we serve is receiving a relationally led economic intervention. The majority of our clients are the working poor, and success for us is often helping connect them to jobs and other economic opportunities.
Intervention – What we do in every client’s life is to intervene. Clients who come to us recognize they need help, much in the same way that an ER helps people who are in need of something done for them that they cannot do for themselves.
Economic – Every time we serve, love, and care for our clients, we are influencing their economic viability. We focus on the healthy interdependence ALL people require to flourish. Commerce funds our charitable work, and our charity actively reinforces the need for the local exchange of goods and services.
Relationally Led – Our Care Team, Check-in Volunteers, and Staff are all focused on being present, caring for, praying with, providing additional resources, and loving our neighbors in need. Hope comes through relationships. This includes our nearly 80 nonprofit partners as well, whose stories I’ll share later.
Our tagline is, “Food is the First Step.” Coupled with our third core value of “Hope,” these guiding principles compel us to look beyond the calories we distribute and focus on the community we’re building.
Some of the activities we commit to include:
• Diverting streams of waste to pig, chicken, and emu (yes, emu!) farmers.
• Working with dozens of employers to promote job openings.
• Supporting the Puyallup/Sumner Chamber of Commerce through membership and cross-promotion.
• Training clients through a six-week class designed to help improve job placement and retention.
• Providing professional development for staff to promote economic development in our community.
Nonprofits and governmental agencies do not generate commerce, but we directly benefit from the businesses that exchange goods and services. "Benefit" isn’t likely a strong enough word. We would not exist without businesses. No businesses, no government, no nonprofits.
Our board and staff understand how we have severely disrupted food systems, making food cheaper, less healthy, and far less relationally connected. For instance:
• Food expenses as a percentage of the average U.S. household budget used to account for over 40% of income. Today, it is around 10%.
• Feeding a family used to require an average of 2,300 hours of paid and unpaid labor. Today, it equals about 350 hours.
• In 1900, food traveled an average of 18 miles. Today, it is well over 1,500 miles.
• At that same time, agriculture accounted for over 40% of our nation’s GDP. Today, it is less than 1%.
Fifty-three years ago, when we started, food also looked very different. Farm animals like turkeys, chickens, and hogs took longer to raise to maturity and were much smaller than their counterparts today. Berries are now much larger, sweeter, and juicier. Pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and virucides are ubiquitous throughout our food systems. The food landscape is completely unlike what our grandparents or even our parents would have encountered.
My 90-year-old mother has dementia. She often tells the same childhood stories on repeat, all of which pertain to food—like the time the preacher came over after Sunday service to slaughter a pig, or how she and her four sisters spent time with their single mom planting, harvesting, canning, and cooking. Or how much she hated asparagus so much that, as a 10-year-old, she woke up at 4 a.m. to stomp it into the ground. “I learned to love asparagus,” she always reassures me.
Because she grew up in Walla Walla, she also learned to love onions, particularly Walla Walla Sweets. It’s because of this affection that her fellow assisted living residents lovingly dubbed her “Onion.”
Dementia robs the most important things last. She can no longer remember what happened five minutes ago or five days ago. I have a feeling that right after she forgets about the pig or the onions, I will be the next to go—before the great abyss. Her last memories demonstrate to me the paramount importance of her childhood relationship with food, something many children today cannot appreciate.
Back to being a champion of commerce—and on the subject of hope. At the PFB, we are constantly pushing for better jobs, increased agency among our clients, and reinforcing the interdependency we require, particularly when it comes to food. Our clients can still make their most meaningful experiences around a meal.
We partner, for instance, with the Golden Rose Community Park. Billie, a resident who started her own nonprofit there, serves her neighbors with food she picks up from the PFB. She makes stews and casseroles, and she even smokes brisket on a Pit Boss smoker we gave her. Over 180 residents live as her neighbors, many on SSDI or other fixed incomes. Although Billie doesn’t have a business, and her neighbors are mostly beyond employment, she is engaged in a form of commerce. She is also providing relationally led economic interventions. She just calls it “supper.”
Billie’s meals are shared with individuals who are faced with spending their last few dollars on food or heating bills. The communal connections engendered through this partnership help seniors feel a sense of hope and belonging. This positive momentum provides both financial relief and familial connection.
Joann runs Mother 2 Many, a skate park outreach that serves hundreds of students from Sumner to Orting. She picks up from us once per week and spends her hours serving, loving, and feeding many students who do not have anyone at home when they get out of school. Joann likewise helps commerce. Sound like a stretch?
Business experts and owners agree: The most critical employment skill is communication. Joann recognizes that students today are declining in their interpersonal skills. A cyberworld does not train for soft skills like eye contact, active listening, body language, and empathy. Joann’s work helps teens today become the employees of tomorrow and the leaders of the next decades.
Joann + food + love + skills = economic opportunity.
Our three core values are Provide Relief, Serve Generously, and Give Hope. I often say that if I didn’t do the last one, I wouldn’t want to do the first two.
Many food-based ministries read from Matthew 25, where we are instructed to give water or food to those in need. This demonstrates compassion to our neighbors as if we were serving Christ himself. We take this a step further.
The Puyallup Food Bank invites court-ordered community service volunteers. This isn’t something a lot of nonprofits do. It’s messy, sometimes difficult, and not often efficient. Many of our 65-year-old retirees can work circles around a 22-year-old who got a DUI. But here’s the thing—not only is that 22-year-old getting a chance to find a home among our 300 active volunteers, but they are being trained for meaningful work in a place filled with loving people.
We train these volunteers for warehouse and customer service jobs. We model the compassion of Christ by inviting the “prisoners” to us, feeding, training, and encouraging them along the way.
There are so many more stories of these kinds of intentional partnerships and relationships. Our staff is so immersed in this thinking that they often say “yes” before I even know what we’re doing.
If we weren’t strengthening commerce, I wouldn’t want to be in this industry (nor could I, as we literally wouldn’t exist). Hope comes in many forms. One of the most obvious is through meaningful, well-compensated vocational work.
I want to thank the many financial partners and volunteers who make our work possible. We moved nearly 4.7 million pounds of food last year. The retail value of this food is well over $20 million. We did this all with about $1 million in cash, much of it from neighbors contributing a few hundred dollars each month.
If you are one of these supporters, thank you! You are in relationship with our clients, our volunteers, our partners, and our staff.
If you have not made the PFB a part of your giving, I invite you to join us. We have never needed your support more than now.