director of R.I. Community
Food Bank.
Name: Bernard J. Beaudreau
Position: Executive Director, Rhode Island Community Food Bank
Background: Prior to accepting his position at the Rhode Island Community
Food Bank in 1995, Beaudreau worked from 1984 to 1995 at Oxfam America, ultimately
as director of development for the international nonprofit organization. From
1982 to 1984, Beaudreau worked in the development office at the Community College
of Rhode Island. He worked at the Women’s Development Corporation, a Rhode Island
housing organization, from 1980 to 1982.
Education: Master’s degree in community planning from University of
Rhode Island, 1979. Bachelor’s degree in resource development from the University
of Rhode Island, 1977.
Age: 48
Residence: Barrington
Founded in 1982 and located in West Warwick, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank solicits and stores food donated through food drives and by supermarkets, wholesalers, food processors and local farmers. Donated food is redistributed to the food bank’s 547-member agency programs, 239 of which are emergency food providers such as food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters. An average of 500,000 pounds of donated food is distributed monthly to approximately 44,000 people. Nearly half of all food recipients are children.
PBN: How does Rhode Island stack up to nearby states, and nationally, in
terms of its vigilance in battling the problem of hunger?
BEAUDREAU: We’re not as bad as the national average, but we have the
highest hunger rate in New England.
What do you attribute that to?
Well, it’s partly a function of the sort of city-state that we live in. It’s a little bit of a statistical anomaly, but it’s also due to the fact that the jewelry and before that the textile industries long ago left the state. You have a lot of underemployed in the adult population, who basically don’t make enough to feed their families. I thought it was really interesting when John Hazen White got up during the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce annual dinner (last month) and proclaimed that the manufacturing sector was going to get organized and create 20,000 new manufacturing jobs. Which I think is a bold statement, because they’re competing with the cost of labor in Mexico and Thailand and Malaysia and China, which makes Rhode Island labor seem phenomenally cost prohibitive.
So you’re seeing more and more workers making not enough of a wage to live on. Twenty-four percent of all Rhode Island jobs pay below the poverty level for a family of four. And just because you’re above the poverty level doesn’t mean you can pay the bills. That’s why a lot of federal programs have 185 percent of the poverty level as their standard of eligibility, or 165 percent in the case of food stamps. So we have a fundamental economic dis-equilibrium. Too many people are not experiencing the benefits of this country’s incredibly vibrant capacity in terms of business, industry and development.
What would your message to Governor-elect Carcieri be?
My message is, congratulations on having such an incredible following of business leaders, and I think people have great confidence in him as a problem solver, as someone who understands the problems of business. But we won’t succeed as an economy if we don’t include the human capital. It won’t happen without labor, without well-fed labor – people who are ready for work and not besieged by the sort of financial burdens that are sort of killing them every day … It can’t be social programs second, business development first. They’ve got to be hand in hand somehow. Especially, the bigger tax payers in our state have to understand that there needs to be an investment made, so that we will have a healthier, vibrant economy – not in a year or two, but in five and 10 years.
What kind of partnerships do you have with business, and what more can
be done with business to eliminate hunger in Rhode Island?
The partnership that the food bank has with the corporate sector has really grown in the last few years – we’ve knocked on their door much more aggressively. We’ve had people like Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro and Anne Szostak of Fleet Bank agree to co-chair our capital campaign, which is to raise $6 million to move this food bank to a facility in Providence. We’ve capped out in terms of what we can do as a food bank. Starting the year I got here, we were down below three million pounds of food distributed, and we grew almost exponentially, but then we capped off at about six million pounds. Six, six and a half million pounds seems to be what we physically can handle, in terms of the off-take capacity of this facility. We’re just cramming food in as hard as we can, and you have to have room to work. At some point you can’t go any farther.
Does this growth indicate a growing problem of hunger in the state, or
your increased ability to penetrate that problem?
Definitely both. Nationally, hunger has been steady – it has really not declined during the economic growth of the ’90s. We were fairly aggressive in trying to meet more of the need. We raised money and bought a trucking fleet to pick up and deliver food and really help the agencies out, so that they could spend more time focusing on the client. In the last year and a half, though, the need has gone up because of the slacking economy. Just a for-instance: If you take the first quarter of this fiscal year – July, August, September – and compare it to last year, we saw a distribution that increased by 6 percent, in terms of the amount of food that went out to pantries. The number of people served, though, increased by 8 percent – we went from 31,000 to 34,000 people served in pantries – so the food is not keeping up with the growth in need for food in the population.
And I know actually that in October those numbers went up. We had the highest food distribution numbers on record in 20 years of history. We did 695,000 pounds of food in one month. So that is certainly an indication of the growing lines for food. We know about a woman who waits from 5:30 in the morning till 10 in the morning to get the food she needs. So that’s a pretty dramatic problem, and the problem we have is that we can’t keep pace with that need out of this facility.
