DC Central Kitchen: Fighting Hunger & Building Community

One out of every eight Americans struggles with hunger today, according to the national nonprofit Feeding America, a network of over 200 food banks.

In the nation’s capital, statistics compiled by the Capital Area Food Bank are just as grim as the national picture: one in five children are at risk of hunger in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, fifty percent of adults are skipping meals because they cannot afford food, and nearly 40 percent of the clients they serve are being forced to make the gut-wrenching decision of choosing between food and paying for living expenses like heating or other utilities. The Capital Area Food Bank also notes that job loss, the faltering stock market, foreclosures and sinking home values are forcing new faces into food lines at DC area nonprofits that are reporting increases in demand more than triple the demand of recent years.

Despite the staggering number of citizens who face hunger, as a nation, the United States wastes more than 27 percent (96.4 billion pounds) of our available food supply, according to the most recent government statistics – which date back to 1997.

Fortunately for the greater Washington, D.C. area, one organization is at the forefront of capturing wasted food and recycling it by recreating it into wholesome, delicious meals for those who need it most.

DC Central Kitchen stepped into the national spotlight on January 20, 1989, when it recycled excess food from the Presidential Inauguration by redistributing it to shelters and soup kitchens. From the start, DC Central Kitchen has been an organization dedicated to making better use of existing resources, never letting food, volunteers or dollars go to waste. This is a philosophy the organization still follows today, even as a $7.2 million organization.

“The existing resources today are not the same resources we had, or lacked, years ago. We had to get over the fact that we’re not a tiny nonprofit anymore. We served 200 meals a day when we opened our doors. Today we serve 4,500. We can’t rely on food donations alone to feed that many people,” said DC Central Kitchen CEO Mike Curtin, adding, “In the last three years, we’ve really worked to reexamine our business model.”

“Thinking carefully about the words of our mission, I saw that money was an existing resource we are fortunate to have, and that spending it to supplement the food we recycle was not really an issue. Then I asked myself ‘Is it our mission to spend money on tomatoes flown in on a plane from Belgium?’ and the answer was – quite obviously – no. I saw that spending our dollars on food from local communities and local farmers was a much better fit for our mission,” said Curtin. “I realized that the farmers producing food in a 150-200 mile radius of our operation were an existing resource that we had not tapped.”

And with this innovative shift in thinking, Curtin has been able to transform his organization’s food recycling program, culinary job training and catering services by recycling surplus crops and thousands of pounds of produce that area farmers would otherwise have been unable to sell to grocery chains for aesthetic reasons. The program has also created a new way for volunteers to donate their services: crop gleaning. Every week during produce season, a corps of dedicated volunteers journey out to a local farm to pick and load surplus crops onto DC Central Kitchen trucks. Food that would otherwise have gone to waste is now being reinvented into nutritious, delicious meals.

Mike Curtin credits his experience with The Center for Leadership Innovation in helping him to refocus DC Central Kitchen’s mission to make better use of existing resources in a way he never before dared.

This innovation is resulting in major cost savings for the organization; money that is funneled back to DC Central Kitchen’s most critical programs. In its 2009 annual report, the organization noted that in the last half of 2008 alone, they were able to purchase over 17,000 pounds of local produce, directly from the farmer, that cost 52% less than if they had purchased the same volume from a wholesaler.

“What I realized through The Center for Leadership Innovation was that to be a successful, thriving organization you need to be an integral part of the community,” said Curtin. And through collaboration with local farmers, he is doing just that.