Food banking is a bit of an odd duck of the nonprofit world.
It involves all the fundraising and programming of most nonprofits, but also encompasses a heavy-duty operational aspect – with warehouses, trucks, inventories, and distribution points to manage. “It’s logistics with a mission,” said Brian Greene, CEO of Houston Food Bank.
That dynamic makes it difficult to attract leaders from other types of nonprofits into food banking. “The mechanics of food banking are definitely a field of its own,” Greene said. “So pulling people who don’t have this background is a challenge, from a training standpoint, a development standpoint and also a fit standpoint.”
At the same time, food banking leaders often find that their fundraising and programming skills translate easily. If they don’t see a career path at their own food bank, they may well take their experience and jump to another type of nonprofit.
“We started noticing a phenomenon of people leaving food banks, not that they wanted to, but they just couldn’t go up in their own organizations,” Greene said. “We were having to bring in people, either from industry or nonprofit, who were not nearly as prepared as they would have been had they learned food banking well.”
Counteracting all of these forces is a leadership accelerator program that aims to keep promising leaders within the food banking system. The brainchild of Greene, the five-year-old LevelUp! program is currently recruiting its tenth cohort of leaders.
LevelUp! approaches leadership development in much the same way that far-flung for-profit companies, say Chevron or Bank of America, do. Such companies offer leadership training at a national level, giving employees a career path that’s not limited to the city where they happen to be. “That’s something that we sorely needed” at the national food banking level, said Greene, who got executives at his own food bank and at the Community Food Bank of New Jersey to help him launch and run the program.
The effort is paying off, with between 60% and 70% of LevelUp! graduates being promoted or expanding their role at their own food bank or another one. So far, about 110 leaders have graduated from the 12-week program, which runs three times a year and includes leadership assessment, individualized career coaching, live online sessions every week, six online leadership modules, and two 2-day in-person sessions.
The program does not cover the fundamentals of food banking, but rather strategies for how to address issues that might arise in food banking. “We open them up to a lot of possibilities and support them as they try them out,” said David Wedaman, Ph.D., a LevelUp! instructor and adjunct faculty member at William James College in Newton, Mass.
A major benefit of the program has proven to be the lasting relationships that members of the cohorts form, said Brandi Derr, Psy.D., M.Ed., a director at William James College and also a LevelUp! instructor. “They learn that the problems they’re facing mirror those of leaders and other food banking systems. They start to share resources and they create networks that last long after they finish the cohort,” she said.
Rounding out the LevelUp! team is Terrence Williams, Psy.D., vice president of human resources at Community Food Bank of New Jersey. Williams provides career counseling and helps cohort members identify and prepare for new roles.
Applications for LevelUp!’s next cohort are due December 13. Find out more here. – C.C.
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