Kevin Hagan stands in front of a big white Feed the Children truck, a group of volunteers from PepsiCo and Walmart listening to him speak about hunger in America.
Behind the truck snakes a line of roughly 800 low-income people who have shown up on this side street in Northeast Washington to receive boxes of canned soup, corn flakes, peanut butter, Avon skin-care products, and other items the volunteers will soon distribute.
Mr. Hagan, who in June will mark a year as president of Feed the Children, speaks into a microphone that doesn’t quite amplify his voice. He’s spent the morning posing for photographs and talking about how uncomfortable it makes him feel: “This is what I like least about my job.”
He is low-key and self-deprecating, a native of small-town Georgia who spent his career in Washington helping to improve efficiency at the U.S. Postal Service, overseeing corporate ethics at U.S. Foodservice, and serving as the second in command at the nonprofit Good360 before moving to Oklahoma City to lead Feed the Children.
In other words, Mr. Hagan is nothing like Larry Jones, Feed the Children’s founder. Mr. Jones, a traveling preacher, started the charity in 1979 and built it into one of the country’s largest, in part through his televised appeals for cash to help starving children at home and abroad.
High Fundraising Costs
But as the charity grew, so did questions about its efficacy. Critics said that most of the group’s money fed Mr. Jones’s fundraising machine and that its food distributions did little to tackle chronic hunger.
Then, in 2008, a bitter feud erupted publicly between Mr. Jones and charity leaders including his daughter that resulted in a spate of lawsuits and unearthed allegations of kickbacks, wiretapping, undisclosed raises, pornography, and misspending. Mr. Jones denied wrongdoing. The Oklahoma attorney general intervened, and a criminal investigation into former employees is expected to wrap up in early summer.
A Fresh Start
But with the charity’s own legal troubles resolved and the Jones family gone, many nonprofit officials, Oklahoma’s chief nonprofit regulator, and the group’s employees are rooting for Mr. Hagan to speed Feed the Children’s transformation from pariah to high performer.
Some nonprofit leaders say the charity, which draws a portion of its supporters from predominately conservative Christian parts of America, could become an important voice on hunger issues in Washington.
So far, Mr. Hagan has secured membership for Feed the Children in nonprofit associations and persuaded some watchdogs to remove warnings advising donors against giving to the group. He’s begun to recruit new board members and is in the early stages of revamping the organization’s domestic programs to enhance their impact beyond handing out boxes of supplies.
Under an interim president, Cass Wheeler, the charity developed a strategic plan—the first in its history—and put in place board term limits, anti-nepotism and anti-fraternization policies, and other basic tenets of nonprofit governance.
“They are listening to their new CEO, and he understands what it takes to run a charity,” says Julie Bays, Oklahoma’s chief charity regulator, who in 2011 decided against putting Feed the Children into receivership because she was encouraged by its leadership under Mr. Wheeler.
Skeptical at First
Mr. Hagan, 40, knows that Feed the Children still has a long way to go.
During a lengthy interview this month in his office at the charity’s compound-like headquarters in Oklahoma City, Mr. Hagan says that he, too, was initially a skeptic, repeatedly turning away the headhunters trying to persuade him to interview for the job.
But he was ultimately convinced to take the position by the charity’s staff members, he says, namely their commitment to its mission and their readiness to move forward.
Mr. Hagan has already hired two people to advocate on hunger issues in Washington and says he intends for the group to become a voice for poor people.
He’s also made some small changes to the charity’s signature food distributions; for example, people at the Washington event had an opportunity to register on-site for federal food stamps.
Since 2010, the organization has been making changes to its international programs.
The group continues to run feeding programs in schools and community centers but sees that work as one piece of a “four pillars” strategy that also includes education, water and sanitation, and projects that help people earn money.
In February, Feed the Children formed a partnership with World Neighbors, a respected international group. As part of the arrangement, World Neighbors staff members will train Feed the Children employees in the group’s model for working with communities abroad.
Mr. Hagan says he intends to give high priority to efforts to measure the effectiveness of the charity’s work. Until now, such efforts have been rudimentary, if not entirely absent.
Feed the Children is working with consultants to “rebrand” its identity. Likely on the chopping block is the group’s logo, which, according to charity lore, Mr. Jones sketched on a napkin in Ethiopia years ago.
It is also pondering whether to change its name. A few critics have raised questions about the name Feed the Children: Only a portion of what it gives away is food-related, and the group serves families, not just children.
Staff Reorganized
To help accomplish his goals, Mr. Hagan announced a reorganization in March that created 47 new jobs and eliminated 33 others. The television department, for example, is now a “marketing services” department, staffed with people whose expertise includes Web design, graphics, and other creative skills.
As Mr. Hagan walks the long halls of Feed the Children’s offices, he notes the windows that are slowly being installed in the building. Until this year, there were none.
Gone, meanwhile, are the most of the security cameras that the charity’s former leaders installed throughout the hallways and offices. Mr. Hagan took them down last year.
He nods at a big fake Christmas tree festooned with lights, balls, and a big teddy bear in the charity’s old television department. Mr. Jones, whom Mr. Hagan refers to only as “my predecessor,” used them as a backdrop for his commercials.
“I don’t plan to use those,” says Mr. Hagan, who last year ended the nonprofit organization’s contract with the company that purchased television airtime.
Changing Perceptions
Mr. Hagan wants to change the culture, too.
The charity’s old leadership operated under the belief that big was better, say people familiar with the organization.
Its revenue grew, on paper, to more than $1-billion a year, thanks not only to megaspending on fundraising (typically more than 60 percent of the group’s cash) but also by accepting products that didn’t always fit the charity’s mission and by valuing some goods, like deworming drugs, at high rates. (The charity’s chief financial officer says the organization has always followed accounting rules.)
Feed the Children has already become more conservative in its approach to valuing medicines, and it will be choosier about what noncash items it accepts, says Mr. Hagan. He says the group will focus not on the total number of people served but on the impact it produces on their lives.
“I believe that we may have to get smaller before we can get bigger,” he says. “The perception of the employees of this organization has always been we’re big and we want to be big. But size really has nothing to do with impact.”
Two Holdovers
Despite Mr. Hagan’s plans for change, some of Feed the Children’s critics aren’t satisfied.
Daniel Borochoff, president of CharityWatch, questions why Feed the Children’s executive team of five still includes two holdovers from the Larry Jones years.
“I wouldn’t advise people to donate to Feed the Children until they replace some of their key personnel,” he says. “The organization lacks credibility for hanging on to people that were with this organization through the scandal.”
Mark Lipton, chair of graduate management programs at the New School’s Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy, studies nonprofit founders. He says Feed the Children seems to have done very little to communicate exactly what it does and how it’s moving forward.
Indeed, the charity’s Web site is scant on details about its programs. “I’m struck by how little they’re doing to convey that this is a new organization,” says Mr. Lipton.
Mr. Hagan says a Web site overhaul is under way.
To Mr. Borochoff’s criticisms, Mr. Hagan says he spent a great deal of time ensuring that top officials who worked under Mr. Jones were people he could trust.
“I wanted to be very comfortable with the team I have, and I am,” he says, adding that the two put their jobs on the line in the conflict with the charity’s founders.
High Hopes
A number of nonprofit officials in the U.S. and abroad say they are eager to see Feed the Children evolve.
Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, says he has been heartened by Mr. Hagan’s leadership so far.
Mr. Berg says he would like to see Feed the Children become an anti-poverty group, not simply one that distributes food and supplies but one that works more closely with Feeding America and local food pantries and develops broad advocacy messages on America’s social safety net.
In fact, Mr. Berg says, the group has a real opportunity: Some of its supporters are conservative Christians from red states whose voices would be powerful ones in calling for the expansion of federal nutrition programs and other anti-poverty benefits.
It’s man bites dog,” he says. “They would be a very welcome addition.”
But, he says, Mr. Hagan needs to move quickly: “They have resources, and this is all incredibly realistic for them to do in a short time.”
Mr. Hagan, whose contract comes up for renewal in two years, says he is confident that donors and other nonprofit officials will be able to look back at that time and be astonished by how far the group has come.
“We know there’s a tremendous amount of potential at Feed the Children, and we know there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done.”
Feed the Children: What It Does
IN THE UNITED STATES
Now: Responds to disasters; distributes food and other supplies to low-income people; runs an education program that distributes backpacks and school supplies and meets other needs for teachers and students.
Future: Recently opened a two-person policy office in Washington and anticipates expanding its advocacy work. The charity is building more intensive relationships with schools and beginning to explore other ways to have a longer-term impact.
OVERSEAS
Now: Programs in more than 15 countries include the distribution of meals to roughly 350,000 children a day and longer-term projects to improve sanitation, help people earn a living, and support education. The charity also responds to disasters.
Future: The charity has formed a partnership with the international group World Neighbors, whose staff will be training Feed the Children employees in its community-development approach abroad.
