Giving voice to the nonprofit sector

When Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson evoked the role nonprofits play in society at the Democratic National Convention last month, it was music to Robert Egger’s ears.

Still, Egger would have liked to have heard politicians, including the president, tout the role nonprofits play in the modern-day economy.

Egger, who is president and founder of DC Central Kitchen, has been a fixture in Washington’s nonprofit sector for more than two decades. He says politicians need to understand the growing importance of nonprofits.

“We are an industry and we should be viewed as such,” Egger said.

According to a study from Johns Hopkins University earlier this year, nonprofits employ 10.7 million people and account for 10.1 percent of the nation’s total workforce, making it the third largest among U.S. industries. Retail trade and manufacturing hold the top two slots, respectively.

Healthcare, education and social assistance account for 84 percent of the nonprofit sector. The study also reveals that the sector has grown at an annual rate of 2.1 percent since 2000.

This growth could explain why some governors have started focusing on the nonprofit sector and appointing representatives to their administrations.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) was the first to do so in 2010, and Govs. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) have followed suit.

“Taken collectively, they are in the top five employers in our state. If you include hospitals, they are the biggest. They need to be at the table. Their ideas need to be listened to,” Malloy said.

Egger lauds such appointments but wants more politicians to follow the example. Earlier this year he set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group called CForward to endorse candidates who are willing to engage nonprofits in a serious way. To date, the group has endorsed eight candidates at the city, state and federal level: seven Democrats and one Republican.

Egger’s decision to enter the political arena is not without its risks — it could change how people view him and his life’s work at the DC Central Kitchen, especially if he’s seen as a partisan. But Egger rejects that. This is a logical next step, in his view.

“I’d like to endorse more Republicans,” he said. “We’re dealing with one issue here — the economic role of nonprofits. Any candidate talking about the economic recovery that doesn’t include nonprofits isn’t a viable candidate,” he added.

The Kitchen, which is located in the basement of a homeless shelter just a few blocks west of Union Station, has served more than 25 million meals to low-income and at-risk residents in the District.

“The Kitchen was born because no one else would do it. Everything in my career has been provoked by the fact that someone else should have done it and didn’t,” Egger said.

When Egger first developed and presented the concept of the Kitchen to church groups around the city, he was met with doubt and skepticism. Some told him he was naive if he thought he could train the homeless.

“Then it became a matter of decision. If they’re not going to do it, I will,” recalled Egger. “Then I spent two years trying to figure it out.”

With the help of a $25,000 grant from the Abell Foundation, he initially secured a refrigerated truck and space to store and prepare the food in the LeDroit Park neighborhood near Howard University. He quickly set to work picking up food from restaurants, private parties and events all over the city. Within months he was overwhelmed. But he saw an opportunity to grow the enterprise, and perhaps replicate it in other cities across the country.

Come January, DC Central Kitchen will celebrate its 24th birthday. Egger remembers how the group found its footing: It was 1989, and George H.W. Bush was about to be inaugurated. He called up the Republican National Committee and offered to pick up the leftover food from the inaugural balls.

“This will be a great way for the new president to show what he means by a ‘thousand points of light,’ ” Egger recalled telling the official.

The RNC liked the idea and accepted his offer.

The mission has grown over the years and has been replicated on 32 school, college and university campuses around the country.

Today, the Kitchen has an annual budget of $11 million, employs 140 people and relies on about 12,000 volunteers to carry out its mission. It processes 1.1 million pounds of food annually, dishes out about 5,000 meals per day to homeless shelters and transitional homes around the city, and has a mobile outreach unit to build relationships with and feed the homeless on the streets. The Kitchen also has a contract with DC Public Schools to provide more than 4,000 meals to low-income school children.

Still, Egger doesn’t want the Kitchen to be thought of as just another soup kitchen. It’s much more than that, offering a culinary training program to unemployed men and women seeking to turn their lives around. Every year, 80 students go through a rigorous course learning knife skills, food preparation and basic nutrition.

“It was never about feeding the poor,” Egger said. “I wanted to take things apart and put them back together in an interesting way, reusing food and resources. I’ve just developed a system that empowers you to use the tools you already have. I take food that would have been thrown away, to teach people how to cook to feed people in the city for free.

“A great nonprofit doesn’t try to fix the problem,” he said. “It exposes the tools we have.”