Checkstand Donations Aid Assault on Hunger

Looking at her gas bill one day, Linda Hamilton was struck by an idea that has now spread from two grocery stores in Redlands to hundreds of supermarkets on both coasts and yielded more than $200,000 in donations to help feed the hungry.

While they ponder the purchase of candy bars, magazines and cigarettes, shoppers at 229 markets in California, Connecticut and Massachusetts can now pick up 50-cent, $1 or $5 charity coupons that cashiers ring up together with their groceries.

At the end of every week, the proceeds of the shoppers’ impulse-giving are sent off to the Redlands office of Food For All, an organization founded by Hamilton and her husband Milan, a minister in the United Church of Christ.

Food For All then sends most of the money to local organizations and to charities overseas to help them buy food for distribution to the homeless and to needy families.

“The idea was inspired by my utility bill, believe it or not,” Linda Hamilton said this week. Seeing that the gas company offered its subscribers a chance to help pay poor people’s heating bills, Hamilton decided that food shoppers should have the same opportunity.

Displayed in Stores

Incorporated in 1985, Food For All now displays its coupons in all 179 Lucky stores and three Hughes Markets in Southern California, 36 Waldbaum’s Foodmarts in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and in 11 independently owned stores in the Los Angeles area.

Rather than using the proceeds to set up a new soup line, however, the Hamiltons concluded that it would be better to funnel the money to charity agencies that are already in business.

“It would be reinventing the wheel to have our own distribution program,” Linda Hamilton said.

The program expanded beyond the experimental stage this year, but not all shoppers have gotten the message. Many customers at a Lucky store in the Los Feliz District said this week that they overlooked Food For All’s blue, red, green and orange display racks bolted to the check stands.

A sign on the rack announces, “Food for All--A Simple Way of Giving. Help End Hunger in Your Community. Contribute to Food For All whenever you buy groceries. Select a card and take it to the cashier. You Make the Difference.”

“I never even saw it,” said shopper Eileen Latham. “I don’t know a thing about it, but if it gets help to poor people, sure, I’d give. I’m for anything that feeds the poor people.”

Other shoppers were dubious about the organization, which has gotten relatively little publicity outside of supermarket trade publications.

“I’m aware of it (the display) but I don’t like it,” said Barbara Golding, who said she supports a downtown mission and the Salvation Army. “I just like to give to charities I know. I have no idea what this is, so I’m very suspicious.”

Hamilton said a redesign of the display rack is in the works, along with a new text in Spanish designed to appeal to Latino shoppers.

Nonprofit groups struggling to cope with the growing numbers of the needy in the Los Angeles area praised the program. According to an estimate by the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, there are 700,000 people in the city of Los Angeles who live below the poverty line.

“They (Food For All) are . . . taking a different approach in reaching people who want to help people who are hungry but they may not know how to go about it,” said the Rev. Kathy Cooper, executive director of the coalition, which is made up of 90 organizations that are active on the hunger issue.

The allocations are determined by committees of local volunteers, almost all of whom were recruited through churches and synagogues. Many of the recipient organizations are also sponsored by churches or Jewish groups.

Variety of Foods

“We bought things like cans of high-protein foods with pop tops so homeless people could just use them even if they didn’t have a place to prepare food,” said Marea Kelly, executive director of the Westside Food Bank, which received $1,700 from Food For All earlier this year.

Some of the money went for wholesale buying of rice, beans, tuna, peanut butter, potatoes, carrots and onions to make up the weekly grocery bags prepared for families who rely on the Westside Food Bank’s 33 client agencies to help make ends meet.

Other agencies that benefitted from the program include the Kern County Food Bank in Bakersfield; the Fullerton Interfaith Emergency Service in Orange County; the United Samaritan Help Center in El Cajon; the Valley Storefront of Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles; La Puente Food Pantry in the San Gabriel Valley and St. Joseph’s Table in Wilmington.

In addition, Food For All sends about 25% of its proceeds overseas. Recent grants included $20,000 for projects working on agricultural development in Brazil, Senegal, Mali and Cambodia.

Efforts Begins Slowly

Food For All began slowly, with displays of donation coupons at two groceries in Redlands that brought in more than $6,000 in donations in two months.

“At that time we didn’t even know how to get a rack manufactured,” Hamilton recalled. But the idea, publicized in Redlands by students from Cope Junior High School, struck a responsive chord.

“I offered my store as a guinea pig two years ago and now it’s going great guns,” said Paul Gerrard, a Redlands grocer whose two locations bring in more than $200 a week in donations from shoppers.

“My customers liked the idea that we were doing something for somebody else and not just for ourselves, and that we made it available for them to participate in,” he said.

Since expanding to all Lucky stores and to the Waldbaum’s outlets in New England earlier this year, the total intake has now topped $209,722, much of it in the last three months, Hamilton said. A total of $118,307 has been distributed to groups that fight hunger, she said.

Jennifer Leonard, vice president for grants at the California Community Foundation, said her organization gave Food For All $10,000 to help expand its Adopt-a-Store program, under which churches and other groups help publicize Food For All in local communities.

“They were small, but we often make what we call venture capital grants to groups that are small, well-run and addressing areas of pressing need,” Leonard said. “We help underwrite their administrative costs so more of the contributed money can go directly to the food programs.”

At the United Way headquarters in Los Angeles, emergency services manager Eugene Boutilier said, “I’ve never seen a new organization beginning from scratch that aligned itself so thoughtfully with what was already out there.”

He said the new group posed no threat of competition to existing organizations. “Because of the economics of scale, we’re very much opposed to the proliferation of food banks,” he said. “But a proliferation of donors, that’s no problem. And a proliferation of people educating other people about the problems of the world, gosh, that’s no problem.”

“It’s a very painless way that a shopper can help feed the hungry,” said Richard E. Frederickson, senior vice president of Lucky’s Southern California division. “The numbers are pretty impressive. The week of Thanksgiving our shoppers donated a little over $8,000.”

The response of shoppers in New England has been “way beyond our expectations,” said Dan Lescoe, vice president of sales and marketing for Waldbaum’s, which has trumpeted the campaigns in newspaper and radio advertisements.

“I read about it in a trade magazine and said, ‘Geez, that’s a type of thing our company would like to get involved in,’ ” Lescoe said.

Food For All staff members were too busy at first to expand to New England, but they placed their racks in Waldbaum’s four weeks ago. The response has far exceeded the initial projections of $1,500 a week for the entire chain of 36 outlets, Lescoe said.

Individual stores where donations of less than $100 were expected have reported contributions of up to $400 a week, he said, but that level may not continue indefinitely, since the level of giving may tend to drop off once the newness wears off. Giving tends to surge again before the holidays.

Lescoe also said the pattern of generosity in New England has been surprising.

“What we found is that in some communities where there is less money, where you’d think that people would be more the recipients (of charity) than the givers, those stores are the biggest contributors.

“The only thing we could figure is that these people see that level of need on a daily basis in their communities, and if people live in a very affluent community they don’t see that level of need every day.”

One resident of an affluent community served by Waldbaum’s is actor Paul Newman, who lives in the Connecticut town of Westport.

Newman has agreed to serve as a spokesman for Food For All, Hamilton said, but it has been difficult to find time on his schedule to have him pose for advertising photographs or to get him to sit down to record a public service announcement for radio broadcast.

Hamilton said she expects Newman to be more visible on behalf of Food For All next year.

She also said it was difficult to spot a similar pattern of giving in Southern California, although the affluent community of Palm Springs is one of the lowest in terms of average weekly donations from the five stores that participate in the program there.

Stores in Redlands, Santa Monica, Long Beach and Van Nuys have brought in the most donations so far, she said.