Giving to Food Causes Is Increasingly Popular — and More Complicated

Kelly Campbell

During a Food and Society conference six years ago hosted by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, documentary filmmaker Curt Ellis was taking a break in his hotel room, watching TV coverage of President Obama signing a law expanding AmeriCorps, when a light bulb went off in his head.

Mr. Ellis quickly gathered a few dozen people from the conference to discuss creating a “good-food” effort that would meet the new law’s directive to create AmeriCorps programs addressing childhood obesity.

“I realized this is the moment where we can put those young people out in the field in national-service positions connecting kids to healthy food in school,” he says. Two years earlier, visiting college campuses to promote his film King Corn, a takedown of industrialized agriculture, students had impressed him with their passion about food as a social-justice issue.

From Mr. Ellis’s eureka moment emerged FoodCorps, a nonprofit that works with schools to improve student nutrition. Its co-founders include Mr. Ellis and five of the people he rounded up at the Kellogg conference. Kellogg itself joined with AmeriCorps and provided the initial funding, and FoodCorps has since grown from a $2 million budget its first year to $10.5 million today, with staff and volunteers in 18 states.

HIROKO MASUIKE/The New York Times/Redux

Mr. Ellis is not alone in his passion for the issue. A growing number of foundations, donors, and nonprofits are keenly interested in improving the way food is raised, encouraging better nutrition, and supporting more fair systems of food production and distribution.

“I don’t see anything philanthropic that’s been on a similar trajectory or anything even close to this,” says Scott Cullen, executive director of the Grace Communications Foundation, which makes grants related to food, energy, and water and runs programs like the Meatless Monday campaign.

“It’s in every aspect of popular culture and society, and it was so underappreciated or ignored over a long period of time,” he says. “It’s gone from ignored to almost ubiquitous. It’s been a remarkable jump.”

Cultural Phenomenon

Hunger has long been an important issue for nonprofits and grant makers, but now, with a boost from media stars including talk-show host John Oliver and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, food-related philanthropy is growing fast.

The Foundation Center’s most recent data on the 1,000 U.S. foundations that give the most over all shows that almost $495.6 million was donated to organizations working on food, nutrition, and agriculture issues in 2012 — a nearly 300-percent increase since 2002.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has devoted 11.6 percent of its total grant making to agriculture development since its founding in 1997, according to a 2015 report by the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and the Meridian Institute. In June, the foundation announced a six-year, $776-million commitment to fighting hunger and malnutrition.

In 2014, based on the growing interest of its members, the Clinton Global Initiative created a new area of focus on food issues. The “Food Systems Track” supports programs that address hunger, improve nutrition with fortified foods, increase the productivity of small farms, reduce food waste, and mitigate the environmental footprint of food production. Commitments in this area make up 9.9 percent of all new commitments announced at the 2015 annual meeting in September.

The Environmental Grantmakers Association says its members’ giving to sustainable agriculture and food systems doubled from just over $55 million in 2012 to more than $110 million in 2013, the most recent data available. And in 2011, large foundations including Gates, Kellogg, the Walton Family Foundation, and others came together and started AGree, which seeks to promote food and agriculture issues as national priorities.

A big part of the growth in food-related grant making may be thanks to the Sustainable Agriculture & Food Systems Funders, a diverse network of foundations dedicated to improving the way food is produced and distributed. Over the past 10 years, since spinning off from the Environmental Grantmakers Association, the network has seen exponential growth: Today it has almost 100 paying members and many others who participate in its programming and events. Virginia Clarke, the group’s executive director, attributes that growth to several things, including having a full-time staff that has been able to take advantage of donors’ interests, promoting food issues to other funder networks, and bringing in the New Venture Fund as the group’s fiscal sponsor.

Getting the Rich on Board

In addition to foundations, wealthy individuals are also showing more interest in food-related causes. “Virtually every family we hear from these days has some interest in food,” says Eric Kessler, founder of Arabella Advisors, which makes recommendations for donors. “It’s pretty remarkable.” In the United States, 50-million people lack consistent access to sufficient healthy food, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study, while 1.3-billion tons of food is wasted each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Since its founding in 2005, Arabella has worked on about 40 client projects related to food — involving individual donors, institutional foundations, impact investors, corporate foundations, and businesses, Mr. Kessler says.

And there is anecdotal evidence of strong growth in the number of nonprofits dedicated to agriculture and nutrition, though that growth is difficult to quantify. Last year, the James Beard Foundation and Food Tank produced the Good Food Org Guide a directory highlighting about 400 nonprofits in the United States working on food and agriculture, nutrition, hunger, and obesity. This year’s updated guide lists nearly 1,000 groups, says Danielle Nierenberg, president of the nonprofit Food Tank, which calls itself “the think tank for food.”

The list of problems and challenges is long and complex. About one in nine people around the world does not have enough to eat, according to the United Nation’s World Food Program Resources Defense Council. Seventeen percent of children and teens and more than a third of adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Furthermore, according to the SAGE Encyclopedia of Food Issues, published this year, an estimated 20 million Americans — about a sixth of the nation’s work force — are employed in food industries, many of them without basic safety protections or living wages.

The Center for High Impact Philanthropy

Complex Issue

With so many inextricable moving parts associated with getting food from the farm to the table, tackling those issues can be a complex arena for grant makers and donors. In 2012, several corporate, individual, and foundation donors approached the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy seeking guidance on how to get the best results from their combined efforts.

“So many funders are working in programmatic silos, and that makes it difficult to understand the broader food-funding landscape, how it fits together, and where opportunities exist for collaboration,” says Carra Cote-Ackah, director of partnerships and strategic efforts at the center and the project leader on what became the Food Funder Compass.

Published in 2013, the Compass is a guide that identifies four main impact areas of food philanthropy — health and hunger, environment, vibrant communities, and rights and equity — and includes case studies and additional examples of positive change in each of those areas.

Approaches that affect more than one of those areas are often seen as the most promising. For example, a grant maker advocating for reduced levels of pesticides through the nonprofit Food & Water Watch may be able to show benefits to the environment, human health, and worker conditions. A donor supporting job-training programs through organizations like DC Central Kitchen can support local economies while also reducing hunger, improving health, and even cutting down on transportation emissions.

In Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, which has suffered from decades of disinvestment and has a lack of healthy food choices, the nonprofit Growing Home is using high-production urban farming as a gateway to transform the lives of residents facing employment barriers.

Through paid 14-week internships on its farm sites, participants contribute to every aspect of production, from planting to selling to customers. All produce is sold locally, generating about 13 percent of the organization’s revenue. The rest comes from individual donations, corporate, and foundation funders. In addition, the program includes intensive job-readiness training, like resume workshops and mock job interviews. Partner organizations help provide services like legal aid, childcare, and GED preparation.

In 2014, 85 percent of participants finished the 14-week program and about 80 percent of those graduates found jobs, most of which pay above minimum wage and include some benefits. Many program graduates continue working in the food system.

Ken Goodman

Allies in the Kitchen

Chefs are helping to draw awareness and funding to food issues domestically and abroad, often by partnering with existing charities or creating nonprofits of their own. Training programs have been growing to help bolster their advocacy efforts.

One of those programs is the James Beard Foundation’s Chef’s Boot Camp for Policy and Change, started by Mr. Kessler, of Arabella Advisors, who joined the culinary charity’s board in 2012. Mr. Kessler had helped create a similar program for musicians, and created the boot camp as a way to harness the most trusted voices in the food world to influence issues ranging from antibiotic overuse in animal production to food-aid reform. Over an intensive three-day period, chefs participate in workshops centered on topics such as how advocacy campaigns work and how to build them to an overview of how policy change happens at the state and federal levels. Chef Michel Nischan, who founded Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit working to increase access to healthy, local food, helps lead the boot camp.

The program, which recently held its eighth boot camp at Shelburne Farms in Northern Vermont, is supported by grants and individual donations, from funders including the Baltimore-based Osprey Foundation as well as Mr. Kessler himself. All expenses are paid for the attendees and another nonprofit, Chefs Action Network, was created to create ongoing support for the activist chefs.

Coordination Grows

Progress is being made in terms of better coordination, says Ricardo Salvador, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and previously a program officer for food, health, and well-being at the Kellogg Foundation.

“The funding side has grown to mirror what’s going on on the advocacy side,” Mr. Salvador says. Groups are looking for ways to pool ideas, capacity, and influence to be most effective, though that work is at the very early stages.

Mr. Salvador is involved with a coalition called the HEAL Food Alliance (Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor) that has brought together groups like his Union of Concerned Scientists, the Food Chain Workers Alliance, and the Movement Strategy Center. The idea is to involve both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) grass-roots groups to support a common cross-sector platform that promotes healthy, fair, green, and affordable food. The intent is that this “good food” platform will result in thriving local economies, better stewardship of the environment, and healthier people.

The alliance’s efforts may include community-organizing campaigns, influencing political candidates and campaigns by holding individuals accountable to the platform, and rewarding businesses for socially responsible practices. The coalition also plans to expose bad actors — those who enable abuses of food workers, endanger consumer health, and damage the environment. Along with Food Policy Action and the Union of Concerned Scientists, the alliance recently launched Plate of the Union, an advocacy campaign urging presidential campaigns to make food policy a national priority during election season.

The alliance’s organizers acknowledge that their goals are ambitious, though this big thinking has already led two donors to support the early stages of their planning.

Says Mr. Salvador, “The audacity is believing that we can take organizations that are accustomed to working on their own, with their own mission and own goals and funding,” and provide resources to those committed to supporting systemic change.

The organizers and its supporters recognize that building a successful “good-food movement” will be a lengthy process.

“It took a long time to build the so-called food system,” former New York Times columnist and bestselling cookbook author Mark Bittman told a group at this year’s Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders conference in Chicago, as the HEAL Food Alliance was discussed. Since then, Mr. Bittman accepted a yearlong fellowship at the Union of Concerned Scientists working on this effort.

“It happened very, very gradually and it’s happened over the last 100 or 120 years,” he added. “It can’t take 100 or 120 years to be something better, but it’s not going to take six weeks, either.”