Many food bank leaders arrive at the position because they have a background in fundraising or sometimes finance or banking. Healthcare and the military also mark the pathways of some leaders.
For Andrea Williams, the newly named President of Oregon Food Bank, the throughline is her focus on racial and economic justice. Born and raised in Oregon, Williams is descendant from three generations of farm workers who came from Japan and the Philippines to work on sugar cane fields in Hawaii. Their experiences inform her identity as a person of color.
Stories of her family led to Williams’ dedication to the immigrant farm worker movement in Oregon, where her parents had moved to seek educational opportunities before she was born. Having grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood, working on immigrant rights offered Williams a sense of belonging, for the first time, in her home state.
“Hearing stories of my family in Hawaii, I wanted to contribute to that cause in Oregon,” she said. “So my career path before coming to Oregon Food Bank was largely to advance immigrant and farm worker rights from a policy and advocacy standpoint.”
A job at the food bank was not an obvious fit. Williams first spent about ten years working at an immigrant rights organization on policies aimed at improving the lives of Latino immigrants and their families. In that work, the food bank was never on her radar screen.
Then, during the pandemic while working for the City of Portland, Williams noticed Oregon Food Bank starting to support pro-immigrant legislation. The food bank contributed about $300,000 in unrestricted revenue toward the Oregon Worker Relief Fund, established during the pandemic to ensure support for undocumented people who couldn’t access federal relief.
“I was like, ‘What’s going on at Oregon Food Bank?’” Williams said. “I got really interested. That large chunk of money was one of the first concrete ways I saw the food bank show its values and take action toward racial justice.”
Soon after, a vice president role at the food bank opened up. Williams applied for and got the job, about three years ago. She starts her new role as President in December, taking over for Susannah Morgan who is relocating in a family move to the Philadelphia area.
As President, Williams plans to draw upon her long experience in advancing policy change. A big win early in her career was a measure to ensure all Oregonians, regardless of citizenship status, could obtain a drivers license, something that the immigrant community had identified as a top need. The measure failed in 2014, leading Williams to help create a coalition of more than 100 organizations that worked to build partnerships across the state, ultimately leading to passage of the law in 2019.
At the food bank, one of Williams’ first orders of business will be to continue a campaign called Food for All Oregonians, which aims to establish a state-based program to provide food assistance to immigrants currently barred from accessing the federal SNAP program. The program would ultimately help about 60,000 people in Oregon, with the food bank focusing first on the vulnerable populations of youth and seniors.
“I bring a special expertise on this topic from my previous work,” Williams said. “I’m really looking forward to advancing that and hopefully securing a victory. And if we don’t next session, we’ll go back the following.”
Williams speaks from experience: “Any of the policies I worked on in my career have taken many, many years to pass. It takes persistence. It takes continual iteration and relationship-building for it to ultimately pass. And I have confidence we’ll get there.”
Over the last three years, Williams’ work at the food bank has been focused on strengthening internal systems to keep pace with rapid growth during the pandemic. Now that the food bank is distributing about 48 million pounds of food annually, Williams sees its “growth edge” in being able to impact policies that would reduce the need for food banks in the first place, she said.
Williams understands the importance of food to a person’s ability to thrive, she said, especially having met her now-husband when he was a college student accessing food pantries. Even so, she never would have joined a food bank that focused solely on food distribution. “I joined Oregon Food Bank because I saw the food bank taking bold stances toward social and economic and racial justice issues,” she said.
Food banks today must be able to both distribute food while driving policy change. “That’s what I think is so beautiful about Oregon Food Bank,” she said. “We are attempting to weave those together.” – Chris Costanzo
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