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More Than Food:
Bill Shore's Vision of Sharing Strength to Fight Hunger
On a typical hot and hazy morning in August 1984, Bill Shore, C'77, was
on his way to Senator Gary Hart's Washington office when his life
changed. Hart's first presidential campaign had just come to an end.
Shore, a legislative and political advisor to the senator, had been a
campaign staff member. "It's probably hard," he says, "if you haven't
been through it, to fully appreciate what it's like. When I say
'campaign,' I mean five or six years worth of effort on Senator Hart's
part." Putting every other aspect of his life on hold at the campaign's
crescendo, Shore traveled with the candidate to three or four states
every day over a period of several months. Now, after a brief vacation,
he was "easing" back into the routines of Senate life. It was, he
recalls, "a relaxed time."
Recovering from the intense and exhausting campaign experience, Shore's
idea of relaxation was reading the Washington Post while
maneuvering through rush-hour traffic on Interstate 270. A brief article
about impending famine troubled him: "200,000 to Die this Summer in
Ethiopia." The calamity had not yet struck; the experts could see it
coming, but they could also see that nothing was going to be done to
stop it. "To me," he reports, "the newspaper story read like an
invitation to act."
Before this, "action" would have meant recommending to Hart some
politically beneficial course."I sat thinking about what the famine
meant, what it would be like for the ravaged families who lived there.
For the first time since my involvement in the presidential campaign, I
really felt something about world events; I made an emotional connection
to something beyond the usual calculations of how they could be turned
to political advantage. It just seemed that since I felt so strongly
about it, I ought to pay attention to that impulse." This reconnection
with his own best instincts, the simple expedient of paying attention to
what he felt and thought, was the first step in a new career of
drawing together a connect-the-dots network of seemingly disparate
causes and purposes, enterprises and individuals to help the hungry.
At once liberal and conservative, idealist and realist, dreamer and
pragmatist, Bill Shore is a hard person to categorize. He is founder and
executive director of Share Our Strength (SOS), the antihunger and
antipoverty organization born of his impulse to take action against
famine in Ethiopia and hunger in America. SOS is the fruit of an
emotional connection -- Shore talks a lot about "connections" -- that
spanned his strictly political obsessions and brought together his
idealist's compassion with his pragmatist's understanding of effective
action. "I tend not to think in terms of traditional labels because
they're always confining. The success of what we're doing depends on
reaching out and building bridges to people who either don't agree with
us or haven't thought about these issues. We make an effort in terms of
substance and style to connect with people who may not be from a
traditional activist background and give them a sense that there are
ways they can really make a difference. If you look at a cross-section
of our organization's supporters, most of them are moderate or
conservative business people, certainly not from the kind of traditional
liberal background that I was born into."
Share Our Strength's philosophy declares: It takes more than food
to fight hunger. Through a variety of innovative and
entrepreneurial strategies -- including food assistance, nutrition
education programs and the treatment of malnutrition, the promotion of
economic independence for individuals and communities, and advocacy --
SOS works to alleviate and prevent hunger and poverty by mobilizing both
industries and individuals. Since its founding in 1984, Share Our
Strength has disbursed over $43 million in grants to more than 1,000
organizations. Shore calls his approach to combating hunger "idealism
without illusions."
In Revolution of the Heart, the story of his journey from
traditional politics to the pragmatic idealism that inspires the
organization he founded, Shore writes: "Without a doubt our greatest
challenge is to make people care again about alleviating the effects of
poverty, to make them want to do something about it in the first place,
and to make them feel that they can." SOS recruits individuals to "share
their strength," creating opportunities for people to use their skills,
talents, energy, and creativity in programs that fight hunger. Writers,
for instance, contribute their writing; chefs donate food, specialty
dishes, and cooking skills; and business executives share their
expertise in strategic planning, marketing, and communication. Shore and
his colleagues have found that individuals are generous and eager in
sharing their talents and that such personal involvement connects them
to the work of SOS in ways a financial contribution could not.
Almost all of the funds (70-100 percent) raised by a number of
grass-roots events go to SOS's antipoverty and antihunger activity. The
annual Taste of the Nation benefit holds culinary events in more than
100 cities. More than 10,000 volunteers -- chefs, restauranteurs, and
food and alcohol distributors -- contribute their time, their skills,
and their products to a national event that both benefits the hungry and
provides business people with visibility and the opportunity to meet
with potential customers. Every fall, Writers Harvest, the nation's
largest literary benefit, holds readings by thousands of writers in
bookstores and on college campuses across the nation. SOS also conducts
a number of publishing ventures.
"The best location to build support," says Shore, "is the intersection
of private interest and public interest. All of Share Our Strength's
fund-raising programs are designed to ensure that our contributors get
back something of value in addition to the psychic rewards of doing
good." From 1993 to 1996, SOS and American Express worked together in
the Charge Against Hunger campaign, a partnership to raise funds for and
awareness of hunger in America. For American Express, the campaign was a
corporate commitment to involve employees, card members, and merchants
in support of the partnership's goals. During the last quarter of each
of these years, American Express contributed two cents to SOS every time
their card was used anywhere in the U.S. The campaign was advertised
nationally on TV, and the advertisements featured Shore and the work of
Share Our Strength. The Charge Against Hunger also helped advance
several objectives for American Express: employees became involved in
local communities, American Express was identified as a good corporate
citizen, and the company built better relationships with the merchants
who take its card by working with them for a good cause.
"Typically what happens with a lot of companies is that they get
involved with us because they think it's gonna improve their market
position. If we build the partnership the right way -- linking
self-interest with idealism -- the employees are able to see the impact
of what they're doing, and they find themselves becoming personally
committed to the underlying issues. We provide a doorway for people to
walk through."
William H. Shore grew up in a red brick house in Squirrel Hill, a
working-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh. His father ran the district
office of Congressman William Moorhead for
22 years. "My father was just a big influence on me when I grew up. He
would come home and talk, not about some public-service philosophy, but
about individuals he knew and their circumstances -- who needed help in
having the snow plows come, getting a better hospital room for their
mother, or finding a lost Social Security check. More than anything
else, he was a day-in and day-out example of being there -- for our mom,
for my sister and me, for anyone who called or bumped into him and
needed help. Working on behalf of people was just second nature to me,
and I never questioned that part of what you did with your life is try
to serve and support others."
The aspirations and activism of the 1960s were also powerful influences
on Shore. In 1968, when he was 13 years old, his family traveled to
Washington to participate in a protest march against the war in Vietnam.
They stayed for three days. While waiting to clear up some confusion
about the family's hotel reservations, Shore's mother bought groceries
and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the hungry college
students milling around the lobby. "I am able to remember Martin Luther
King's and Bobby Kennedy's important speeches, which were eloquent,
passionate, and very inspiring. They gave you a sense that you could
make a big difference. But there's nobody calling people to action
anymore -- there's a lot of stuff around volunteerism, but there's
nobody mobilizing people behind a big idea like ending a war or ending
discrimination."
In the absence of such a summons, Share Our Strength endeavors to
realize a sixties-style idealism by applying sound business principles
to the big idea of feeding the hungry. "The other interesting thing
about labels," notes Shore, "is that they mean different things to
different people. I often hear people say it's really important for
nonprofits to be run like a business. What they're really saying is that
nonprofits should be run in a professional way. One of the things we've
tried to do is professionalize this type of work -- which is to say that
we've built a staff that understands customer service and put together
an organization that is efficient, is accountable for its efforts, and
measures its impact. People say, 'well, that's a kind of conservative
approach.' I don't know if it is or not, I just think it actually
enables us to more effectively execute our mission, which is
fundamentally liberal in content. It's a mix that helps us."
Harnessing the engine of the market, SOS has been notably successful in
raising substantial revenue to fight hunger through a variety of
community wealth initiatives. These hybrids -- what Shore calls
"nonprofits for profit" -- are entrepreneurial enterprises that generate
wealth and provide funding through business ventures, cause-related
marketing partnerships, and licensing agreements. Major corporations
that have entered into partnerships with SOS include American Express,
Calphalon, Evian, Barnes & Noble, Restaurants Unlimited, Fetzer
Vineyards, and Gallo.
Shore, who is currently writing a book on community wealth enterprises,
points out that over the past year, many of the state-wide associations
of nonprofit organizations have structured the agendas of their annual
conferences around this issue. He has keynoted many of these. Formerly,
when he went on the lecture circuit, people would ask how to apply for a
grant from Share Our Strength. Now he devotes about three-quarters of
his time to requests for training in how to create these entrepreneurial
hybrids -- profit-seeking firms that serve social causes. Recognizing
and seizing an opportunity, Shore established Community Wealth Ventures,
a for-profit subsidiary of SOS. The new consulting practice has already
been retained by both nonprofit and for-profit clients.
In recognition of his important and innovative approach to social
problems, Shore will receive Penn's School of Arts and Sciences
Distinguished Alumni Award at a dinner on March 17. The award honors
extraordinary professional accomplishments in an area of the liberal
arts and sciences, and highlights the importance of a liberal arts
education.
Bill Shore cloaks his vision and idealism in the low-key respectability
of the business professional. But whether Share Our Strength is judged
by the business person's standards, the liberal's agenda, or the
missionary's ledger of souls converted, it is hard to argue against the
organization's success. "Ours is an organization of ordinary people
putting food in front of others who have no food -- people leaving their
homes or offices to teach, train, and befriend others in neighborhoods
where there are no such homes or offices; people using their
restaurants, hotels, public relations firms, printing companies,
photography darkrooms, or breweries to produce the dollars needed to
staff kitchens, shelters, and health clinics. Most of these people would
never consider themselves political activists. As the heroes of the
1960s were those who demonstrated for civil rights, perhaps the heroes
of our generation will be those who are demonstrating their own civil
responsibilities."
Share Our Strength
1511 K St., NW
Suite 940
Washington, DC 20005
Phone: (202) 393-2925
Fax: (202) 347-5868
Internet: http://www.strength.org
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