New Second Harvest President E Challenge

Deborah Leff specializes in challenging jobs.

After having worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S, Department of Justice and then as an award-winning television news producer, Leff in February became president and CEO of Second Harvest, the nation’s largest hunger organization and sixth-largest charitable organization.

In her new position, Leff will oversee the operations of a network of 188 food banks, which includes the Spokane Food Bank.

“We reach every state in America and Puerto Rico,” she said in a telephone interview from her Chicago office, “and we reach virtually every county in the country. Through the local food banks, we reach out to 50,000 agencies with 100,000 feeding programs.”

Second Harvest is Leff’s second post in the social services business: After leaving ABC TV she ran the Joyce Foundation, a philanthropic organization that annually distributes $35 million in grants in the areas of education, employment, environment, gun violence prevention, campaign finance reform and culture.

Now, she brings skills she learned there to bear on an organization that is responsible for getting a billion pounds of food a year into the homes of hungry people across the country. It’s an impressive number, but it comes in service to a cause she wishes didn’t exist.

“There’s a statistic that is both amazing and depressing,” Leff said, “we (Second Harvest) feed one of every 10 Americans.

“I don’t think people realize how many people are hungry. And they’re not just the unemployed. They’re working people, too. Sometimes they’re your neighbor and sometimes they’re the kid in school with your kids.

“If people knew the extent of hunger, they would do more.” Food banking has been criticized for putting a bandaid on a pervasive social problem, but Leff disputes that.

“To get up and out of poverty, people need food,” she said. “Kids need it to succeed at school; parents need it to get up and go to work.

“Hunger has a cure, and we work actively on changing public policy to make sure that in the long run, hungry people are able to work their way out of poverty and become productive citizens.”

In the parlance of the industry, Second Harvest is the middleman in an on-going action against hunger. It solicits food from the industry and distributes it to local agencies.

Food banking began more than 30 years ago, when a retired, Phoenix, Arizona, businessman realized the flow of surplus food could be redirected from the dumpster to the tables of hungry people. Today, the world’s largest food producers donate a billion pounds a year to food banks via Second Harvest.

“The food industry is a major friend of Second Harvest in combating hunger,” Leff said. “If you go into a food bank, you see the same names on boxes there that you see in the grocery stores.

Companies like Kraft, Kellogg and Pillsbury. “Companies have some incentives to give. They believe people shouldn’t go hungry but they also know that if they have food that doesn’t sell, to dispose of it or store it would cost money.”

But the big companies have begun to go beyond mere;u rechanneling unsold food, she said.

“The food industry has been very creative in coming up with new initiatives. The Production Alliance is a good example. Companies like Pillsbury and Minute Maid actually run first-line products and give them to hungry people.”

Since 1977, the Production Alliance has produced 1.4 million pounds of food for distribution through the Second Harvest network. Products range from biscuits to cookie dough, from pancake mix to soup, meat spread and fruit juice.

But it’s not enough to be good at acquiring food if you can’t deliver it, and Second Harvest has built a sophisticated distribution scheme in which local agencies receive food according to the number of poor within their service areas. Second Harvest works with transportation companies, arranging free rides for food when possible, and otherwise negotiating discounted rates.

Finally, Second Harvest manages the network of local and regional food banks it serves, making sure that food is handled safely and distributed in an equitable fashion.

Second Harvest may hold the network together, Leff said, but the individual agencies make it work.

“Hunger is different in every community - the Spokane Food Bank serves more children than others, for example - and the agencies have a great deal of autonomy in meeting the needs of their communities.

“But they still have standards of quality they have to meet, and they have to make sure the outlets they serve are up to standard.”

The Second Harvest that Leff now leads has grown quickly in its nearly 30-year existence, from that single Arizona pantry to a nationwide network of food banks. The network has matured in terms of its ability to cover the nation with short-term supplies of emergency food, and now its growth must occur in other ways.

“Second Harvest as an organization needs to think of food in a broader sense,” Leff said. “We think of canned food and shelf food, and we are proud that we distributed one billion pounds of food last year. But pounds alone are not the ultimate value of success - the quality of food has to be considered, too.

“There’s a new type of food you’re seeing at food banks,” she said. “Since 1993, the food banks have had a fresh produce program, and now we have a fresh fish program.

“These are important foods, but sometimes it’s more difficult to handle fresh foods, to get them to families. You have to move the food quickly and efficiently, and at the right temperatures to the locations where they are headed, and that takes money, frankly.”

Leff said the creative resources within the food bank system are vast but in the loose affiliation that exists, good ideas can fall through the cracks.

“Since February, when I joined Second Harvest,” she said, “I’ve been traveling around the country to visit the food banks. It’s been interesting for me; I am really struck with the innovations they come up with at those 188 food banks. This is an organization where the creativity comes not from the central office, but from the local agencies.

“For me, one success will be if we can help the food banks learn from each other.

“We also want to see fewer hungry people,” Leff said. “Most Western industrialized countries don’t have hunger. It’s a terrible irony that America is in a tremendous period of growth, yet the amount of hunger is up.

“We want people to know that hunger is a major issue in Spokane and that there is something they can do about it. They can volunteer at food banks. They can go to our Web site (http://www.secondharvest.org) and educate themselves about hunger in America.”