$100,000 Boost : Ford Foundation Lauds County Food Distribution

Joel Rodriguez was delighted to pick up five pounds of cheese and four pounds of rice Thursday at Wilmington’s Holy Family Church, one of 1,200 churches, community organizations and cities linked through the Los Angeles County Foodnet Program.

“It helps me a lot,” said Rodriguez, 74, a lifelong Wilmington resident who was among 2,000 people to get free federal surplus food at the church Thursday. “It helps everybody, sure, that cheese and everything. I get Social Security. . . . I pay my rent. I just hardly make it.”

The Los Angeles County Foodnet Program’s success in coordinating the distribution of surplus food to needy people was honored Thursday by the Ford Foundation, which announced an award of $100,000 to the program at a New York City press conference.

Massive Job

The county program, which oversees the distribution of about 3 million pounds of food a month, was one of 10 winners nationwide out of 1,347 applicants for awards honoring innovative government agencies.

“It’s the largest food distribution program in the country,” said Robert Tolles, a Ford Foundation spokesman. “It’s unusual in the number of collaborating groups with it--the churches and agencies that are part of this very massive food distribution system. It’s been cited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the model for food distribution programs for the needy.”

The Foodnet program was launched to coordinate the distribution of large amounts of surplus cheese made available by the federal government in 1982.

“Basically what we’ve done is brought together all the agencies who have clients they’d like to give food to,” said Stephanie Klopfleisch, chief deputy director of the county Department of Community and Senior Citizen Services, which administers the program.

‘The Facilitators’

“We’re the facilitators to match available food with agencies that can get it to hungry people. . . . We’ve done it without a giant government staff, and that’s what I think is the unique aspect.”

Klopfleisch said the county runs the program with five full-time employees and an annual budget of $450,000. While most of the food comes from federal surpluses--including honey, corn meal and powdered milk as well as rice and cheese--she said the program also distributes food donated by major supermarket chains or food corporations.

“We have at any one point in time at least 20,000 volunteers . . . working in the program,” she added.

The grant will be used to host a food distribution conference for other government agencies, to create a training film and a handbook and to purchase a computer to ease record-keeping, Klopfleisch said.

Direct Dealings

The coordinator of the program, Herb Oberman, who was in New York to accept the award, said in a telephone interview that the program deals directly with “every one of the 1,200 organizations.”

“In South-Central Los Angeles, we deal with 500 churches,” he said.

“One of the things that impressed the Ford Foundation is we are a government bureaucracy, but we have such a flexible approach to the community,” he added. “We invite the community to be involved on their own terms, and they handle delivery of the services.”

Oberman said that Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn played a key role in urging the Board of Supervisors to initiate the program in 1982.

Hahn released a statement Thursday saying that “the key to success of this program has been community involvement,” and that he is “very proud that it has received this national recognition.”

Hahn’s press secretary, Dan Wolf, said the supervisor’s “only problem” with current food distribution efforts is that “he thinks the government should be handing out a lot more a lot faster. . . . He has written several letters to President Reagan urging that that be done.”