Reality smacked Trisha Cunningham in the face on April 2 as the 55-year-old CEO of the North Texas Food Bank surveyed an endless line of cars at Fair Park waiting for free boxes of food.
The pandemic had just taken hold, and she was shocked by the turnout.
For three hours, Cunningham, her husband, and about 30 food bank employees and volunteers loaded thousands of boxes of groceries into the trunks and beds of every make, model, and year of vehicles driven by people of every demographic.
As she reminded drivers not to roll down their windows, they mouthed “thank you” over and over again.
All this for four boxes each containing a jar of peanut butter, canned vegetables and fruit, pasta sauce, dry pasta, macaroni and cheese, and taco seasoning.
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“This was before the extra unemployment and the stimulus checks, and people didn’t know what they were going to do,” Cunningham says. “Just to know that we were giving them food to put on their tables was really powerful.”
Before joining the food bank three years ago, Cunningham had spent her entire 30-year career at Texas Instruments, finishing that chapter as chief citizenship officer overseeing its global philanthropy efforts.
She wanted to do something just as significant in her second career.
As Cunningham loaded car after car, she knew she was meant to be there.
“Hunger tends to be hidden,” Cunningham says. “Well, it’s not hidden now. People are seeing these lines of cars and seeing that there’s a great need. I can tell you, people don’t line up for those boxes of food if they have money to go to the grocery store and buy it.”
She’s used her TI know-how to marshal additional resources, inspire her troops, and face down a pandemic that nobody had a playbook for.
In the past two months, Cunningham and her executive team have upended this $150 million logistical operation that provides boxes of food to 250-plus nonprofits in 13 counties.
Gone are the thousands of volunteers who manned the food assembly lines. The food bank has doubled its output since March, hired temporary workers, brought in the National Guard, and served more than 30,000 households.
It has taken an additional $15 million in resources to handle the food bank’s COVID-19-related response.
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