Begging for Change

The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All

Robert Egger

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062013224
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

You are a good person. You are one of the 84 million Americans who volunteer with a charity. You are part of a national donor pool that contributes nearly $200 billion to good causes every year. But you wonder: Why don't your efforts seem to make a difference?

Fifteen years ago, Robert Egger asked himself this same question as he reluctantly climbed aboard a food service truck for a night of volunteering to help serve meals to the homeless. He wondered why there were still people waiting in line for soup in this day and age. Where were the drug counselors, the job trainers, and the support team to help these men and women get off the streets? Why were volunteers buying supplies from grocery stores when restaurants were throwing away unused fresh food every night? Why had politicians, citizens, and local businesses allowed charity to become an end in itself? Why wasn't there an efficient way to solve the problem?

Robert knew there had to be a better way. In 1989, he started the D.C. Central Kitchen by collecting unused food from local restaurants, caterers, and hotels and bringing it back to a central location where hot, nutritious meals were prepared and distributed to agencies around the city. Since then, the D.C. Central Kitchen has been named one of President Bush Sr.'s Thousand Points of Light and has become one of the most respected and emulated nonprofit agencies in the world, producing and distributing more than 4, 000 meals a day. Its highly successful 12-week job-training program equips former homeless transients and drug addicts with culinary and life skills to gain employment in the restaurant business.

In Begging for Change, Robert Egger looks back on his experience and exposes the startling lack of logic, waste, and ineffectiveness he has encountered during his years in the nonprofit sector, and calls for reform of this $800 billion industry from the inside out. In his entertaining and inimitable way, he weaves stories from his days in music, when he encountered legends such as Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme, and Iggy Pop, together with stories from his experiences in the hunger movement -- and recently as volunteer interim director to help clean up the beleaguered United Way National Capital Area. He asks for nonprofits to be more innovative and results-driven, for corporate and nonprofit leaders to be more focused and responsible, and for citizens who contribute their time and money to be smarter and more demanding of nonprofits and what they provide in return. Robert's appeal to common sense will resonate with readers who are tired of hearing the same nonprofit fund-raising appeals and pity-based messages. Instead of asking the "who" and "what" of giving, he leads the way in asking the "how" and "why" in order to move beyond our 19th-century concept of charity, and usher in a 21st-century model of change and reform for nonprofits.

Enlightening and provocative, engaging and moving, this book is essential reading for nonprofit managers, corporate leaders, and, most of all, any citizen who has ever cared enough to give of themselves to a worthy cause.

CHAPTER 1

Soup Kitchen
Confidential

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca? Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert. Rick: I was misinformed.

—Casablanca, 1942

In my previous life, I’d been working in nightclubs. Ever since I saw Casablanca at the age of 12, opening the greatest nightclub was all I ever dreamed of doing. Rick’s was the kind of place where you could fall in love, sing patriotic songs at the top of your lungs, or win your freedom at the roulette wheel. Risk and danger were as much a part of the menu as caviar and champagne cocktails. The owner never stuck his neck out for anyone—or at least he made it appear that way—but everyone stuck their necks out there. More than anything else, though, from the moment I saw Casablanca, I wanted to be Rick.

In the late ’70s, while all my friends went off to college, I went to chase my dream. I landed my first gig at a cabaret and restaurant called the Fish Market in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, right on the Potomac. I spent my nights in the upstairs showroom—my first classroom, you could say. We had a one-eyed banjo player named Johnny Ford on the weekends, and a cross-dressing piano player who performed as “Herb” on Mondays and Wednesdays and as “Miss Vicky” on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And actually, except for the man-hands, Vicky wasn’t, in the parlance of my father, a bad-looking broad.

At 21,1 moved into D.C. and got a job at a popular club named the Childe Harold, right above Dupont Circle, where I became the bartender, manager, and eventually booker. The Childe Harold was one of those classic blues clubs of the ’60s and ’70s that was caught in the crossfire between the blues of old and the counterculture punk of new. It was the kind of venue where we booked Emmylou Harris one night, the Bad Brains the next. We had the Ramones for their very first gig in D.C. and blues guitarist Mike Oldfield for his very last (he overdosed a few days after the show).

Everything about the Childe embodied the holy trinity of the ’70s club scene: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I dove in with abandon and spent the next two years learning everything I could, which, as is often the case, is best summed up as “everything you shouldn’t do” if you expect to stay in business, let alone stay alive.

In 1983, as punk morphed into new wave, and cocaine and AIDS hit us big-time, I had reached a point where I had to take my nightclub schooling uptown to learn the wants and needs of a richer clientele. I became the manager and maître d’ of a jazz club named Charlie’s, a swanky place named after the famous local jazz guitarist, Charlie Byrd, who had come back from Brazil in 1961 and, with Stan Getz, introduced the country to bossa nova.

Charlie’s had everything going for it: a great location in posh Georgetown; a dark and modern, sort of deco, feel, with long, comfortable banquettes; a piano bar; a showroom in the back; and more than anything else, stellar entertainment. We had big name acts every week, with legends like Rosemary Clooney, Al Hirt, Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, Billy Eckstine, Bobby Short, the Kingston Trio, and Astrud Gilberto, aka the Girl from Ipanema.

On Wednesdays through Sundays, I’d walk down to Charlie’s in the late afternoon dressed in my own version of Rick’s classic attire, a white dinner jacket and blue cowboy boots that my fiancée, Claudia, had bought for me in New Mexico. Four o’clock was My Hour, the hour before dusk. The French call it l’heure bleu. I was inside Charlie’s, getting ready for whatever excitement or disasters were in store. The musicians and electricians would be setting up mies and instruments. The star of the evening would be dressed in casual street clothes to do a sound check.

At 7:00 p.m., it was “Showtime!” for the staff, and we were rolling. We pushed the standard supper-club high-ticket items—lobster, prime rib, surf and turf. The waiters pushed a lot of Dom and layered drinks on the customers to get the checks up.

Champagne out front, cocaine in the rest rooms, and everyone—men and women—smelling of Calvin Klein’s Obsession. And lots of talk—Washington people tended to talk through the performers, even the top acts people paid a lot of money to see. After closing, Simon the Brazilian bartender and I would pour ourselves a little Rimy, count the receipts, and check the liquor stock. Then I’d cruise through the kitchen, watching as food servers tossed away unused fish, steak cuts, vegetables. Like other restaurants, we had little storage space. “Night, Amadou,” I’d say to our towering North African chef. And then I sailed out the door and walked up the hill to my apartment.

So … about that truck that got me here. Well, when I trudged up Wisconsin Avenue from Charlie’s, I’d always pass Grace Church, a 100-something-year-old stone chapel overlooking the Potomac River. Claudia and I wanted to get married, but we’d found most of the Georgetown churches fairly snooty except for Grace. The minister there was more than willing to marry us at an affordable price, so as a goodwill gesture, we started attending service as often as possible.

Grace was part of a volunteer effort called the Grate Patrol that, along with other churches in the neighborhood, took turns cooking food and serving it to the homeless at designated street corners. Being the new kids in the congregation, we were encouraged to volunteer for the Grate Patrol. But feeding the poor on a truck just wasn’t my thing. Then one day we got cornered by an organizer and had run out of excuses.

On a gray, overcast Tuesday afternoon, I found myself in the teeny basement of Grace Church, helping other volunteers cook a mammoth pot of lentil soup. The goal was to feed 140 people in the District. We had white bread, the soft kind, cookies, oranges, and bananas. “No apples” we were told, since many of the “grate” people had bad teeth and couldn’t chew. I’d never thought about that, but it made sense.

Around 6:30, as we sat out in front and watched the sun set over the Kennedy Center, a Salvation Army truck pulled up to the church. It was a renovated delivery truck with shelves and countertops spotted with coffee and food stains from the hundreds of runs it had made over the years. We filled 10-gallon Cambro containers (think really big thermoses) with soup and got inside, and the four of us—Claudia, me, and two veterans of the patrol—took off, riding standing up, bouncing over D.C.’s infamous potholes.

Frankly, I was nervous and a little bit scared, if not for me then for Claudia. She always wore large, dangling hoop earrings that I bought for her from the street vendors in D.C., and I warned her, “Baby, you should take off your earrings.” I didn’t explain why, but I thought to myself, What if some crazy homeless guy tries to grab them off you when you hand him his dinner? Claudia, who grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and who could more than look after herself, rolled her eyes and politely suggested, in language I won’t repeat, that I lighten up.

Our first stop was the corner of 21st and Virginia Avenue, right across from the State Department and near George Washington University. A light rain started to come down. As soon as we rounded the corner, I saw people had already formed a line. There were almost 40, mostly men, but a few women, and the way they gathered instinctively around the truck was almost Pavlovian. Some were lucid, some were babbling gibberish, some were scamming. “Hey, can I get some for my buddy?” Some flirted with Claudia.

Interestingly, we never left the truck. It was almost symbolic to me in a disquieting way, people reaching up to us, looking into our eyes, as we handed our gifts down. God bless you, my child. Here’s a bowl of lentil soup, now please step away from the truck.

As we rode to the next stop, I asked the seasoned volunteers where the food came from. They told me that parishioners bought it at the Safeway in Georgetown and always prepared it in the basement kitchen. I thought about the incredible amount of food I’d seen thrown away in my career, but I was equally intrigued that the volunteers were shopping at the “Social Safe-way” in Georgetown, probably one of the most expensive grocery stores on the planet.

At 17th and New York Avenue, across from the Corcoran School of Art and within eyeshot of the White House, an equally long line was already waiting. At the back was a guy in a suit with a briefcase. As he got closer to us, I saw that his outfit was frayed, and the briefcase was probably secondhand. Was this guy working, barely holding it together? Or was he a little “off,” like the couple I’d see who pushed a doll in a baby carriage around the streets of D.C.?

The longer we stayed out there, the more questions I started asking myself. At every stop, the men and women threw their empties on the sidewalk and our driver would have to leave the truck to clean up after them. Many seemed to be down, but hardly out. Why weren’t these people working? Why, at least, couldn’t they pick up after themselves? I whispered these questions to Claudia, but she said quietly in what now looks like a weirdly prophetic moment, “Robert, are you going to judge these people over a cup of soup? Besides, it’s not our business.”

But these questions were eating away at me. Was this all there was to it, handing out food? Where were the social workers, the homeless shelter partners, the drug counselors, the incentives to help these people get out of their situation, or at least out of the friggin’ rain?

It certainly begged the most important question of the evening: Was the Grate Patrol part of a larger solution to end hunger in the District, or had it devolved into some kind of bizarre mutual dependency for the homeless and the volunteers? Who was getting more out of this exchange?

As we left our last stop in front of the World Bank and bounced down Pennsylvania Avenue back to Grace Church, Claudia noticed how quiet I’d become. I sat there amazed by the whole experience. I couldn’t believe there were so many homeless people living in our downtown. Where had they come from and where did they go to at night? More important, why hadn’t I seen any of them before? I’d grown up believing that anybody could pull himself up by the bootstraps, and I had heard the constant call from homeless advocates who protested to the Reagan administration that the homeless were just like you and me, but for the grace of God and our last paycheck.

But these folks who were being fed on the Grate Patrol weren’t like you or me. Man, they were in deep, a whole hell of a lot deeper than a missed paycheck. They needed more than just a meal; they needed total life support. I couldn’t help thinking that for all of its noble intentions, the system of feeding them every night was only helping them stay there.

The next afternoon, I was back at Charlie’s, getting ready for another night at work, trying to focus on the business plan I’d been preparing for my own nightclub. And not just any place, but the world’s greatest.

After nine years of managing clubs, I had decided it was time for me to turn my dream into a reality. My club would have a house orchestra and would put together original shows that would take advantage of the enormous talent pool in the area. I would combine original music, theater, art, and dance. The space would entertain locals, but also tap into the constant flow of tourists, diplomats, and lobbyists, spreading its name nationally and internationally by word of mouth and airwaves until, like Rick’s, it was the only place to go in the nation’s capital. Even the world.

And yet I couldn’t take my mind off the truck I’d been on the night before. How could I just walk away from a hunger problem I knew I could help fix? Over the next couple of weeks, I talked with some colleagues in the food service—local chefs, restaurant managers, and friends who’d gone into catering—to see if they’d consider donating food to the cause. Each of them said that if someone could offset the liability issue so they wouldn’t get sued for bad food, they’d be more than happy to donate their surplus. Hell, it would save them money if they could write off the deduction rather than throw the tons of food away.

Then I scheduled a meeting with the leaders of the Grate Patrol and a few local nonprofit execs, to talk about using the food more efficiently, and to test out an admittedly wild thought I’d had about the people I’d encountered that night.

The idea was simple: The nonprofits could take unused food that was thrown away by restaurants and caterers, but instead of dropping off this food at shelters, like a New York program I’d read about called City Harvest had begun doing around 1981, they could bring it back to a “central kitchen,” where it could be chopped, combined, cooked, and then distributed. And instead of just cooking it, the nonprofits could teach the homeless people the basics of food service as part of a modest job-training program. To me, it was Food Service 101, a logic flow that seemed evident. If you do this, this, and this, then you can do that, that, and that.

“You can’t take food from restaurants and feed people with it,” one nonprofit director told me. “It violates D.C. health codes.” I had similar responses from others I talked to. Some of them complimented me on an admirable idea, but seemed annoyed or amused by my naïveté. Even the parishioners connected to the Grate Patrol seemed ambivalent about the idea: “If we did as you suggested, we’d lose the fellowship of shopping and cooking together.”

As annoying as these responses were, nothing cut me more than hearing the one concern that was repeated over and over again—a disbelief that homeless people were capable of anything more than just standing in line. “You want to train the homeless? Nobody will hire them.” “Look, I know you mean well, but you’re underestimating how hard it is for them to hold down a job.”

This attitude put me over the edge. How could they stand by watching the recipients of the Grate Patrol take food day after day without any hope of getting out of that cycle? How could they not try to do more, or at least do it more effectively? I was stubborn—or stupid—enough to believe that I could prove them wrong.

So I put my nightclub dream on hold and decided to move forward with the kitchen. For the next several weeks, Claudia and I worked night after night drawing up a plan. I learned everything I could about nonprofits. I had a lawyer friend handle the legal work and create bylaws. I looked into the D.C. health code and saw there was no such law prohibiting the reuse of uncooked food. In fact, there were “Good Samaritan” laws in every state that protected people from liability if they wanted to give food to charity. The only thing I had to worry about was the time and temperature of unused food. Food couldn’t sit out at room temperature for more than four hours, so I’d have to budget for a refrigerated truck.

I read all about foundations, corporate philanthropy, and other funding sources from books at the local library. I studied the application requirements and cyclical deadlines that passed throughout the year. Finally, after six months of research and hard work, Claudia and I sent out our first set of grant applications, along with a letter signed by 10 of my restaurant and catering friends pledging their support.

For the next several months, during the summer of 1988, I got rejection after rejection after rejection. Many were form letters; some were personalized with friendly well-wishes. I tried to keep my spirits up by telling myself that if a nightclub denizen and committed hedonist like myself could see the possibilities, and if my colleagues in the biz were as open to helping as they suggested, somebody in the nonprofit side of this coin had to be ready to buy in.

Then one day I received a letter from the Abel Foundation and saw, when I held it up to the light, the outline of what could only be a check inside. My heart raced. I was too nervous to look at the amount, so I tore open the envelope, tucked the check under my leg, and read the letter. “We have carefully reviewed your grant application and would like to inform you of good news …,” it began.

When I pulled the check out from under my leg, I saw the figure and nearly gasped: $25,000!

The next day I strutted into the bank, just like Steve Martin in The Jerk.

Twenty-five thousand dollars!

That’s right, $25,000!

I’d made some dough in my day, but never all at once. To my young eyes, this was a fat check, and yet I knew it wasn’t going to last me six months if I didn’t spend it carefully. I also knew I wanted to avoid being dependent on what I was beginning to see as the whims and flavor-of-the-month funding policies of the foundation community. If I was going to leave my glorious nightclub vision, if even for a moment, I wanted to be damn sure I was not a slave of the system I had entered. I wanted to redefine, recharge, and rededicate the sector—not spend most of my hours drafting grant proposal after grant proposal just to keep the operation afloat for another six months.

To do that, I’d have to create some buzz around the venture. And I’d have to do it fast and cheap. That’s where my nightclub experience began to kick in.

First I had to come up with a name for this thing. I’d toyed with a few ideas, but decided I didn’t want to be too attached to a religious or political message. This wasn’t a left-wing or right-wing thing. This wasn’t a God thing. It was about feeding and empowering people. (Whenever people ask me if the Kitchen is a faith-based organization, I say, “Yes, we have faith in people.”) The name had to be smart and accessible for everyone. That’s when it dawned on me....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Hello, My Name is Robert, and I’m a Recovering Hypocrite
• Introduction - “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” A Brief History of the Handout
• Chapter One - Soup Kitchen Confidential
• Chapter Two - Doing Good Versus Doing Right
• Chapter Three - Feeding the Tapirs
• Chapter Four - Starfish and Random Acts
• Chapter Five - Whom Are You Serving?
• Chapter Six - M=EC2
• Chapter Seven - The Tangible Link
• Chapter Eight - Taking Troy
• Chapter Nine - Take It to 11
• Chapter Ten - Keeping the Faith
• Chapter Eleven - Grab the Future by the Face
• Epilogue - Redemption City
• Robert’s Rules for Nonprofits
• Appendix - Giving and Volunteering Statistics and Resources
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher