L.A.’s First Lady of Hunger Relief

In 1982, at age 47, Doris Bloch decided that she wanted to be an executive director. So she looked in the Los Angeles Times classifieds under E.

After what she jokingly calls “10,000 interviews,” she did indeed become an executive director--of a food bank that had just graduated from a garage to an old machine shop in El Monte.

“There were 10 of us and one truck,” she says. “The driver was legally blind; I found out after I asked him why he kept bringing the truck back with so many dents.”

Still, that year, the truck distributed 5.6 million pounds of food to 65 charities. Today, 18 years and two warehouse moves later, it distributes 40 million pounds of food a year to 965 charities.

And, with this, as Bloch turns 65, the lady who mistook herself for a dilettante is retiring.

“It’s like that joke: Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down,” she wisecracks. “My retirement will include being active in social justice matters. But it will also include sleeping later.”

The job has not left much time for sleep. Under Bloch, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank has become the second-largest in the United States behind New York.

It occupies 96,000 square feet in the industrial heart of South-Central Los Angeles. It has a staff of 50, supported by 50 more volunteers. There is a full fleet of refrigerated trucks, including a semi. And last year the food it distributed reached 300,000 people a week.

Replacing Bloch is now the job of a team of professional headhunters. Finding the right successor will be a feat. “At the national level, people call Doris the ‘mother of food banking,’ ” says Damian Leone, manager of the L.A. bank’s donations. “A lot of people are watching us because we set the trend.”

One of the observers is Doug O’Brien, director of public policy and research at the Chicago-based umbrella group for U.S. food banks, America’s Second Harvest.

“She really is an exceptional woman who has done unbelievable things,” O’Brien says. “Hers are very big shoes to fill.”

The search to replace her is nationwide. However, even the best-qualified candidate might lack her first and foremost strength: her love of her hometown.

“I’m a native Angelena,” she says proudly. “I can remember when Los Angeles wasn’t a third-world city, by which I mean I can remember when there wasn’t this huge pool of abysmally poor people and a huge pool of incredibly rich people, with middle-class people just hanging on by their fingernails.”

When Bloch was born in 1935, L.A. was booming and she was at the very intersection of Hollywood glamour and the real Wild West. Her father owned a chain of eight grocery stores, including the Hollywood Ranch Market.

She was 9 in 1944 when Billy Wilder shot a scene with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity” in one of her father’s stores. At home in Montrose there was horseback riding. It was such a bucolic life, she used to joke, “I’m just a country girl from L.A.”

But a tough rite of passage lay ahead for Los Angeles and the Angelena. A marriage at 20 quickly failed. A second marriage to a wealthy physician also failed. Except that the second time, Bloch was pushing 40 and had three children, ages 3, 6 and 9.

“My husband paid alimony and child support, but my standard of living became totally different,” she recalls. “I knew people as a married woman who didn’t even bother to speak to me when I wasn’t a married woman anymore.”

Her work experience amounted to little more than a stint as an account clerk at a cosmetic appliance firm called RelaxAcizor. So she signed up for a federally sponsored job-training program.

“You start where you have to start,” she says. In her case, it was with an $8,900-a-year filing job in the city attorney’s office.

By the late ‘70s, she had moved up to working as a liaison for a government agency combating red-lining in inner cities. “That’s where I discovered what a ham I was,” she says with a laugh, “and that I had a talent for putting together community activists and business executives.”

After three years consulting charities, her mind was set. She was determined, she says, to work on social justice issues. And she wanted to be boss. At the food bank, then called Community Food Resources, the executive director title came with what she laughingly calls “the princely salary” of $28,000 a year.

Low pay did not translate into a light work load. “The private sector tends to look at a charity and think, ‘Oh, you nice little people, God love you,’ ” Bloch says. “It’s not like that. We don’t stand around singing hymns. We have to be as bottom-line oriented as the private sector, and even more so, because we can’t just walk over to the bank and say, ‘Hey, I’m having a slow month.’ ”

Bloch’s admirers say that she is every bit as hard-nosed as a corporate baron. “Doris is tough,” says Larry Brown, director of the National Center on Hunger and Poverty at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “She doesn’t worry about whose toes she steps on. She has a strong sense of what needs to be done, and she sets out to do it.”

“I’m demanding,” she admits. “I have high expectations of myself, so I have high expectations of others as well.”

At the food bank, she instantly set out to improve how food was solicited, graded, sorted, stored and redistributed to charities.

“When I arrived, I said, ‘What about all this government food that I hear that’s supposed to be going out?’

“They said, ‘Ah, we did that once. It was a real mess. We’re not going to do it again.’

“I said, ‘Wait a minute. I don’t think so.’ ”

A third of the 40 million pounds of food distributed by the food bank last year came from the Department of Agriculture. As a form of farm support, the USDA buys food from farmers in depressed agricultural sectors and distributes it to school lunch programs and hunger relief organizations.

“The food given could be pork roast. It could be apple sauce. It could be pasta. It could be pinto beans,” Bloch says. Her preferred donations are rice and beans. “In the most diverse city in the world, they are two things most people eat.”

The relationship that Bloch forged with the USDA provided a lifeline into South-Central for emergency relief during the 1992 L.A. riots. Bloch recalls coming to work to find that “there were fires being ignited all around us.”

With many markets having gone up in flames, the USDA began pumping relief in through the food bank. “Food is a very calming thing,” she says. “The USDA just inundated us.”

The next step for Bloch was rebuilding. “I had relatives saying, ‘Get out. Get out while you can,’ ” she remembers. “But I wanted something to show that people in this community are not all fire-starters.”

That something took the form of 15 acres adjacent to the food bank. “I’m really old and I remember victory gardens,” she says, recalling home gardens popular during World War II. She decided that one source of food for a community whose grocery stores had burned down was a garden.

Bloch railed at the city for leaving the land derelict, acidly pointing out that a private landholder would go to jail for the tire fires and vermin that were features on the city-owned lot.

She fought the city Department of Water and Power for irrigation and did soil testing to check for contamination. Clearing the obstacle course required calling in favors from federal officials whom she had met through the USDA. She still laughs as she recalls city officials jumping at one particular call from Washington.

O’Brien of Second Harvest says that the hardest part was getting local people to trust the city enough to take up plots.

“Doris did extensive community outreach,” he says. “They now have a community garden that 300 families participate in. What it does is provide a springboard for community organizing.”

Although Bloch will square off with anyone over getting food to hungry mouths, she steers clear of controversies that might undermine her cause. Philip Morris advertisements show an elderly woman savoring a tangerine that we are led to believe went to a food bank through the good offices of the cigarette company. However, Bloch won’t be drawn by anti-tobacco barbs. Philip Morris, she says, is a leading donor to food banks.

“We don’t see a lot of tangerines,” she admits. “However, Philip Morris owns Kraft, Jell-O, General Foods, and they do help. The fact that a tobacco company owns them adds another factor. For us, the question is: What’s the greater good? The bottom line is that Philip Morris feeds a lot of people.”

But Bloch says that beggars must also be choosers. Those attempting to unload rotten cantaloupes need not apply. Moreover, the food bank is highly attuned to the distinct nutritional requirements of those it feeds: high-calorie food for people with AIDS, healthful snacks for children and so on.

While constantly expanding her charity, Bloch has became more and more incensed at the need for it. “I feel like I’m living in a tragedy,” she says. “I see so many people whose horizons are limited.”

Even a booming economy did not reduce swelling ranks of those who she says are being systematically “ground down.”

From Chicago, O’Brien concurs. “Your region is one of the ones that for the better part of the last five years has suffered this paradox of pervasive hunger in spite of a buoyant economy,” he says from Second Harvest’s national office. “California was one of the first states to identify it.”

One reason, he says, was change in food stamp eligibility aimed at getting immigrants off the rolls.

“In California, to apply for food stamps, there is a seven-page application,” he says. “It asks incredible questions such as: What are the liquid assets of your children? It warns you about penalties for false answers. To ask questions like that and then threaten penalties is a real barrier. The L.A. food bank has played a leading role to get some of these onerous requirements lifted.”

Bloch’s line is simple. “If we have to change immigration policy, let’s do that,” she says. “But let’s not do that on the backs of the poor and let’s certainly not do it on the backs of their children.”

At Tufts, Brown insists that the worst rub about hunger in America is that it strikes working people. “Nearly half the people served by Doris’ food bank are working,” he says, “or have an adult in the house who’s working. There is something grotesquely unfair about a parent working full time and still not having enough to feed their children.”

Brown advocates relaxing restrictions on food stamps, now the subject of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

The alternative--charity--is humiliating, he argues.

For her part, Bloch sees no alternative to bigger and better charity while they fight for social change. “I don’t know that our system isn’t humiliating,” she says. “We try not to make it humiliating. One thing I do know: People are aware when they’re being treated as an unwanted person or as a welcome person.”

A strength of the food bank system, says Bloch, is the grass-roots nature of food distribution through local charities. Many who donate time, she says, are “only a half step out of poverty themselves.” A “food bank fact” highlighted in Bloch’s latest annual report shows that 54% of participating charities operate on $10,000 a year or less.

What sets Bloch and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank apart from other do-gooders is sheer survival. Last year, 125 charities were left in the lurch by the collapse of another food bank, Love Is Feeding Everyone. Founded 16 years ago by actors Valerie Harper and Dennis Weaver, LIFE had provided a flattering spotlight for celebrities.

But Bloch was never a fan. “What I saw was two very well-known people of good intention who decided to form a food bank,” she says.

“What I said consistently was that they should have found a way to support the existing system rather than compete with it.”

When LIFE collapsed, Bloch stepped in. The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank took over supplying its 125 charities. Luckily, at the time, Bloch was also completing the purchase of 41,000 square feet of new warehouse space adjoining their existing stores.

A fund-raising drive is being launched to raise the $2.5 million that the additional space has cost. Meanwhile, the warehouse is already stacked to the rafters with USDA-donated orange juice. “Oh, good!” Bloch exclaims when she sees it. “We hardly ever get orange juice!”

Someday, Bloch hopes, food banking, and the hunger driving it, will get smaller. Her dream, she says, is that this new warehouse will someday become a museum.

But so far, expansion has been the story. Twenty-seven years ago, what became the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank was founded in a two-car garage in Pasadena. When Bloch joined it at the start of 1983, it was in 10,000 square feet in El Monte. She leaves it with 10 times that space in South-Central L.A.

And after 18 years of public service, it is she who is consolidating. To finance her retirement, she is selling the family home.

“I’m not going to be rich in retirement,” she says. “But no big deal. I’ve already practiced cutting my expenses and living more modestly.”

When she leaves in June, she will take with her the profound respect of colleagues. Leone, her donations manager, says: “A lot of people will say Doris got up, spoke and told it like it is. She’s encouraged us to be honest. At the last national conference, they gave her a standing ovation.”

O’Brien calls her a “rare jewel of a human being.”

Brown calls her a “star” who has seeded the “vision of a hunger-free America.”

Moving with her into to her new home will be the bulky collection of framed citations now hanging in her office: from the LAPD, the state Legislature, the Emergency Network, the Chinese Community Service Center, the Emergency Food Assistance Advisory Board, the Van Nuys Civic Center and, not least, the Optimist Club.

To donate money to the Food Bank, contact: Janice Vogel Ackles, Development Director, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, 1734 E. 41st St., Los Angeles, CA 90058-1502. (323) 234-3030, Ext. 147.