Heavy Lifting at the Food Bank

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Since she arrived in 1999, food distributed annually has doubled, to 28.8 million pounds last year, 4 million of that perishable produce, a category they were just getting into when she came along. Tienken and her team evaluate how well they're serving their clients—soup kitchens and food pantries—not only by volume but also with measures such as the food's nutritional content. They assess staff performance by such yardsticks as how well they're meeting fund-raising goals. The broad impact of their work is clear. Through intermediaries, the Food Bank helps get food to 83,000 people each week.

UNIQUE OPPORTUNITIES

Tienken has done things at the Food Bank she never would have had a chance to try at Polaroid. She spent her first autumn overseeing the installation of a new $60,000 information system, though she had zero technological background. Her early overhaul of the way customers collect edibles from the Food Bank was also ambitious and far from smooth. Tienken stopped opening up the warehouse to supermarket-style shopping and began to require clients to fax (or later, e-mail) their orders from a list of what was available at the warehouse, then come pick them up. Her goal was to be fair and help keep better track of inventory. But customers complained she was making it harder for them to get food. "They kept accusing me of being corporate, thinking that was an insult," says Tienken, "and I'd say, Thank you.'"

Tienken didn't dismiss their complaints, though. She now seeks out input ahead of time, including submitting changes she's considering to a subcommittee of customers. "She had to learn you can't impose change without talking to a lot of people about it, and you can't talk to everyone like this is the business world," says Beth Chambers, director of community services for Greater Boston Catholic Charities, a big client. Now clients, such as Pat Adams, director of Weymouth Food Pantry, love the system. Adams, who estimates it has cut the pantry's weekly shopping from four hours to less than one, says, "the difference is night and day twice over."

Challenges continue. Today the Food Bank is suffering, as others are, from a decline in federally supplied food products and a rise in food companies' efficiency (and thus declining excess). Tienken's team has successfully lobbied the Massachusetts legislature for greater aid based on the number of people they are serving, but more help is needed. Staff members continue to scour the country for food, and lobby Washington for help, too.

Tienken admits to missing some things about the for-profit realm, including its well-established systems. But what's most likely to lure her back is money. When she started at the Food Bank, she took a 30% pay cut. Now she figures she's making about half what she would in the private sector. "How do I manage this so I'm not working until I'm 75?" she worries. For now, she's still putting in 60-hour workweeks, skipping tennis matches, and doing her Christmas shopping online to save time, in exchange for another kind of payoff. "At Polaroid, it was cameras and film. Nobody was going to die or go hungry," she says. "This business does make a difference."