Claire Babineaux Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America
Courtesy of Feeding America
As costs and starvation rise, a file 11 meals banks make Forbes 2022 record of America’s High 100 Charities, ranked by non-public donations.
The first fashionable meals financial institution was began 55 years in the past by a retired Phoenix businessman and the idea has since unfold to dozens of nations. But it wasn’t till the Covid-19 lockdowns and mass layoffs of early 2020 that meals banks rose to the forefront of Individuals’ charitable consciousness.
“Folks noticed one thing that they didn’t perceive earlier than this—meals insecurity,” says Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, the CEO of Feeding America, which claimed the No. 1 spot on Forbes’ 2022 record of America’s Top 100 Charities, ousting United Way from its longtime perch. It’s the primary time within the 24 years Forbes has been compiling this record {that a} meals charity tops our rating, which is predicated on the worth of personal donations obtained, versus authorities assist or charges for companies rendered.
In its fiscal 12 months ending June 30, 2021, Chicago-based Feeding America took in $4.06 billion in presents, amounting to a 47% enhance over the previous two years. As a nationwide umbrella group, it funnels assist to a community of about 200 regional meals banks, which in flip provision 60,000 meals pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and different packages that (by Feeding America’s reckoning) assist one in seven Individuals.
A file 11 impartial meals banks (10 affiliated with Feeding America) additionally made the Top 100 Charities record this 12 months. Actually, six of the seven newcomers to the record are meals banks: Metropolis Harvest, of New York Metropolis, No. 57; Meals Financial institution of Central and Japanese North Carolina, in Raleigh, No. 62; El Pasoans Combating Starvation in Texas, No. 73; North Texas Meals Financial institution, in Plano, No. 87; San Antonio Meals Financial institution, No. 93 and Feeding Tampa Bay, No. 98. (Usually, Feeding America gives a few third of a person meals financial institution’s annual assist—which means there’s a certain quantity of accounting-industry-accepted double counting of presents.)
As well as, a few dozen different charities that present meals, both within the U.S. or overseas, as a serious a part of their companies made this 12 months’s record. In the meantime, different non-profits past the 100 have been bringing new power, creativity and a focus to meals reduction. Among the many most notable: World Central Kitchen, of Washington, D.C., based by celeb chef José Andrés, has been serving meals in catastrophe areas worldwide, together with wartime Ukraine and Florida after Hurricane Ian.
Supply truck driver Eddie Degois at All Religion Meals Financial institution in Arcadia, Fla.
ALYSSA SCHUKAR/FEEDING AMERICA
Whereas Covid raised meals banks’ profile and assist, inflation is now conserving them busy. After the pandemic spiked in early 2020, the variety of Individuals who reported having hassle paying for meals fell in 2021 as a wave of presidency help, together with stimulus checks and short-term refundable baby credit, fattened households’ financial institution accounts. However that stream of federal money has stopped whilst the worth of meals at residence has surged more than 12% prior to now 12 months, driving meals insecurity back up where it was firstly of the pandemic. In June, 9% of U.S. adults reported they had been being pressured to skip meals and one other 12% stated they needed to make do with decrease high quality or fewer styles of meals.
“It’s not good for the nation that there are such a lot of individuals who should depend on us,” says Babineaux-Fontenot. In September the Biden administration held the primary White Home convention on meals safety in additional than a half century and issued a plan to finish starvation within the U.S. by 2030. Babineaux-Fontenot applauds the aim, however cautions “some important issues must occur’’ for it to be reached.
It is not simply Covid, inflation and politicians that been elevating consciousness of meals insecurity within the U.S. In her 4 years as CEO of Feeding America, Babineaux-Fontenot has practically doubled annual spending on public consciousness packages to $10 million and has emphasised racial disparities in meals insecurity, which in flip has implications for disparities in well being. In fiscal 2021, she greenlit money grants to particular person meals banks taking a broad view of how one can deal with starvation. As an illustration, the Maryland Meals Financial institution obtained a $80,000 grant aimed toward seeing what meals banks can do in the best way of job coaching to extend private incomes and thus cut back starvation amongst those that have been counting on them.
“I need to take disgrace out of being hungry,” Babineaux-Fontenot says. “I prefer to dream large.”
Volunteer meals financial institution employees throughout Hurricane Ian in Florida this 12 months
ALYSSA SCHUKAR/FEEDING AMERICA
A Louisiana native and a granddaughter of sharecroppers, Babineaux-Fontenot, 58, noticed the issue of starvation from a younger age. By a mix of fostering, adoption and beginning, her dad and mom raised 108 youngsters, with a few of them coming into her household malnourished. (The one time she personally skilled starvation, she says, was as a broke faculty pupil and he or she solved that drawback by getting meals from the Salvation Military.)
Babineaux-Fontenot didn’t start working full time on starvation points till she was 54—certainly she was simply honored on Forbes’ 2022 record of girls who’ve made a social impact after age 50. Whereas she went to legislation faculty considering she would possibly grow to be an advocate for youngsters’s rights, she ended up as a tax lawyer. In 2004 she joined Walmart and through her 13 years there rose to grow to be government vp and world treasurer, in control of all tax, treasury and investor relations operations.
A most cancers analysis in 2015 (it was caught early) prompted Babineaux-Fontenot to start fascinated with issues she needed to do and had delayed. However her transfer to Feeding America was much less incongruous than it would sound; Walmart has a deep relationship with the charity and the tax code has performed a central function within the unfold of meals banks.
Greater than 60% of Feeding America’s non-public assist in 2021 got here in donated gift-in-kind foodstuffs from eight giant retailers, with Walmart alone giving $1.5 billion. These companies took benefit of enhanced federal tax breaks created by Congress in 1976 that permit them to deduct from their taxable earnings roughly double their tax foundation (which means their price of manufacturing) that meals. Since 2005 this break has been obtainable to any enterprise, together with sole proprietors and partnerships, so the neighborhood restaurant or nook retailer now additionally has an enormous incentive to donate meals to an area pantry, relatively than let it go to waste.
However there’s been greater than meals flowing to America’s new prime charity. In fiscal 2021, Feeding America additionally obtained a file $651 million in presents of money from greater than 750,000 particular person donors, together with $20 million from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. The 12 months earlier than, Scott’s ex-husband, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave $100 million to Feeding America’s Covid-19 Response Fund—the most important particular person present it has ever obtained.
Feeding America traces its origins again to a retired businessman, John van Hengel, who was volunteering at a Phoenix soup kitchen and noticed a necessity for a facility the place discarded or unused meals may very well be saved—like a financial institution—for withdrawal by these in wanted. In 1967 he established the world’s first fashionable meals financial institution, St. Mary’s Meals Financial institution Alliance in Phoenix and in 1975 he arrange Second Harvest as a nationwide group designed to construct the meals financial institution motion. St. Mary’s is now No. 75 on the High 100 Charities record, whereas that nationwide group was renamed Feeding America in 2008.
“Feeding America has a powerful model,” says Babineaux-Fontenot. “We’re the most important a part of the charitable meals system within the nation,” provides the CEO, whose newest reported complete annual compensation was $965,329.
Partly because of the power of Feeding America, mixed donations to the 100 charities on the Forbes record rose a hefty 8% from a 12 months earlier to $58.8 billion and accounted for greater than 12% of all charitable giving within the nation, as measured by the annual tally of Giving USA. Notably, our record excludes two large areas of Individuals’ charitable giving. We don’t embody schools and universities, on the idea that their donations come primarily from alumni relatively than from most people. Few non secular establishments publicly report information—No. 4 Salvation Military, which is technically a church, is a notable exception—and thus we will’t consider them. (Read more about our methodology for compiling the record and the way you should utilize related methods to guage charities.)
The cutoff for this 12 months’s record—No. 100—is $181 million in donations, 8% above final 12 months’s $167 million cutoff.
Specialists in charitable giving say the general acquire in donations obtained by the organizations on our record was due not solely to public response to pandemic-related wants, but additionally to the inventory market’s sturdy efficiency in 2020 and 2021—tax breaks for donations of appreciated inventory are notably beneficiant. As well as, Congress created a temporary charitable giving tax deduction for 2020 and 2021 for taxpayers who don’t in any other case itemize their deductions.
Nonetheless, particular person charities’ year-to-year outcomes had been uneven and never all charities benefitted from the pandemic. After a long term as No. 1, United Approach Worldwide, a community of greater than 1,300 legally separate nonprofits lengthy depending on paycheck deductions, fell to No. 2. For the fiscal 12 months ending June 30, 2022, because the Alexandria, Va.-based group reported donations of $2.77 billion, a pointy 28% drop. Susan G. Komen, the Dallas-based breast most cancers charity, fell off the record utterly, as Covid-19 obtained in the best way of its main fundraising technique: staging sponsored walks.
Some 18 of the 100 nonprofits on our record reported a complete compensation of greater than $1 million for not less than one worker, down from 24 final 12 months. Usually, the recipient was the highest individual. The highest compensation common for the 100 nonprofits, $966,462, is 12% beneath final 12 months’s file of $1,093,783.
Following the standard sample, the best paid had been chief executives of big-city hospitals: $12,414,295 to Steven J. Corwin of No. 97 New York-Presbyterian Hospital; $9,293,211 to Kenneth Davis of No. 24 Mount Sinai Well being Techniques in New York; and $5,685,657 to Thomas M. Priselac of No. 65 Cedars-Sinai Well being System in Los Angeles. (Whole compensation could embody advantages, deferred compensation and one-time bonuses, and will be for a special fiscal 12 months than that on the record.)
The complete record of the High 100 Charities is here. Every entry incorporates detailed information, together with monetary efficiencies and highest compensated staff. An outline of our methodology and the way donors can use the info and different data to assist consider any charity is here.
