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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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