August 05, 2008 08:53 pm
—
I saw it again in a recent newspaper article. The reference to buying food from Second Harvest Food Bank. It’s a hard concept to challenge as money does in deed change hands! But here’s the deal. We do not sell donated food. Yes, money is paid out, but donated food is not sold. The transaction is called a shared maintenance fee, sometimes referred to as a handling fee.
The idea is that the pantries, kitchens, shelters, child-care centers, rehab, residential, senior and youth programs that agree to partner with us also agree to help support the cost of getting food. Not buying food, getting food. We become a food solicitation arm of each program. We arrange to find donated food from all over the nation and haul it to our central warehouse. Once it is here, we are mandated to store it and handle it safely. Then we make it available to these east central Indiana charities, most often delivering it to their doors.
All this costs plenty of money. We have a staff of paid employees, a facility with upkeep and utilities, vehicles demanding repair, maintenance, insurance and fuel, inbound freight costs and much, much more. This year we will spend $900,000 helping local charities feed needy neighbors.
Before you gasp at that cost, think of the return. We are on track to distribute 4.2 million pounds of food and product by the end of 2008. The average wholesale value of this inventory will be more than $6 million! Now back to that handling fee. The cap is set by our national office, Feeding America. They are advised by the IRS. The fee cannot be related to the value of the food. The fee was just increased by a penny and is now capped at 19 cents per pound.
You do the math. If we could charge the full handling fee on all the products we distribute we would be very close to meeting expenses just from that one source. My job would certainly be a lot easier! But, this cannot happen. The market will not bear it. Pantries and meal programs are hard pressed to come up with enough money to cover a fourth of the approved fee. It falls on Second Harvest to raise the rest.
With that responsibility, we become not only a food solicitation arm for the charities we serve but a fundraising arm as well. In order to provide food for their programs we must raise most of the money the system was designed for them to contribute!
It’s not such a bad idea. A centralized warehouse and a centralized fundraising function. Just as a food donor finds it most efficient to donate to one entity which disperses the product, a funding organization can do the same. United Way has often chosen that path. By funding Second Harvest, they are supporting local charities that reach out with food assistance to low-income residents throughout their county.
The system works best when the charities involved practice the Waste Not, Want Not concept that John Arnold in Grand Rapids, Mich., worked out. This is the idea that the community would be served best if all pantries relied 100 percent on their regional food bank (that would be Second Harvest here in east central Indiana).
The largest pantries in our eight-county service area are Waste Not, Want Not. They use the dollars from their supporters to pay the handling fees for donated food. That’s it. Whatever Second Harvest has is what they distribute to their clients. The clients choose the items they can use and fill in their meal plans with food stamp purchases or money from their own pockets.
The result is that everybody’s dollar goes further. If someone donates a dollar to the food pantry, instead of spending it on a can of soup, they can pay a handling fee at Second Harvest and get five or six cans of soup. If we don’t have soup, they could get even more servings of chicken bullion or dry-pack meals because they weigh less!
So that’s the story. Second Harvest Food Bank does not sell donated food. We never have. We never will.
Lois Rockhill is executive director of Second Harvest Food Bank of East Central Indiana. She can be reached at lrockhill@curehunger.org.
Copyright © 1999-2008 cnhi, inc.
Photos
