We Feed People Because No One Should Be Hungry. Now Let’s Talk About What That Actually Costs.

Here it is:

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We Feed People Because No One Should Be Hungry. Now Let’s Talk About What That Actually Costs.

That’s the tagline on the letterhead of my regional food bank.

“We feed people because no one should be hungry.”

It’s a good line. The kind of line that makes people feel good about dropping a can of soup in a donation box at the grocery store. The kind of line that gets printed on fundraising mailers and annual reports and the bottom of executive director emails.

It’s also the kind of line that deserves to be examined.

So let’s examine it.

I want to walk you through how food banking actually works in my community and in yours. Not the brochure version. The documented version, pulled directly from publicly available partnership materials and IRS Form 990 filings that anyone can look up right now on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.

Here’s the chain.

Grocery stores donate food. Produce approaching its date. Bread. Protein. Canned goods. They donate it because they believe it’s going to feed hungry people in their community. That’s the whole point. That’s the story everyone has been told.

The food arrives at the food bank.

For free.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

That free donated food doesn’t simply flow to hungry people. First it flows through a system. And that system has a price tag.

Want to be a partner organization, a church, a small nonprofit, a community pantry, and receive some of that donated food to distribute to hungry people in your community?

Here’s what it costs you in my region.

One hundred dollars per year. Two year commitment. Non-negotiable.

And then every single time your designated shopper comes to pick up food, nineteen cents per pound. On donated groceries. That the food bank received for free from your local grocery store.

But you can’t even get to the fee schedule until you clear the eligibility requirements. And those requirements are considerable.

You must be a 501(c)(3). You must operate from a commercial location, explicitly in their own documentation, not a private residence. You must have dedicated refrigerators and freezers with working thermometers and written temperature logs updated weekly. You must have a Food Safety Handling certified primary contact. You must carry comprehensive general liability insurance. You must distribute food at a consistent location at least once a month. You must hand out SNAP outreach materials and 211 information at every distribution. You must be registered on 211. You must have a functioning Board of Directors. You must apply during a one month window, March 1 to March 31, once per year. Miss the window and wait another year.

And if you’re a faith-based organization operating out of your own building? You’re welcome to participate, but you may not express your faith to the people you’re serving or require attendance at any service or event to receive food. Follow the rules. Pay the fees. Accept whatever product arrives. Stay within the restrictions of the program.

Now before anyone thinks this is just a Kenai Peninsula problem, let me be very clear about something important.

These aren’t individual organizational choices. Every food bank I’ve looked at across Alaska operates under the same framework because they all answer to the same national authority, Feeding America, the network that sets the standards, the policies, and the per-pound fee structures that trickle down to every partner organization in the country.

The Food Bank of Alaska in Anchorage? Same commercial location requirement. Same food storage requirements. Same temperature logs. Same food safety certification. Same eligibility barriers that exclude grassroots operations. They don’t publish their fee structure as openly, but their IRS filings show program service revenue charged to partner agencies every single year.

The Fairbanks Community Food Bank? Same pattern. Program service fees charged to partner agencies year after year, documented in their public 990 filings. And their most recent filings note something worth mentioning: reported conflict of interest transactions. Multiple years running. That’s not my characterization. That’s a checkbox on their own federal tax return.

This is a statewide pattern because it’s a national policy.

Feeding America sets the rules. Local food banks implement them. And the organizations closest to hungry people, the church pantries, the small nonprofits, the grassroots operations, pay the price. Literally.

I tried to qualify for this system myself.

Eden’s Edge, a working 501(c)(3) nonprofit farm that has donated meat, eggs, and produce to seniors, veterans, and low income families on the Kenai Peninsula with zero fees, zero barriers, and zero strings attached, cannot access this system.

No commercial kitchen.

A farm that is actively raising and donating real food to hungry people in this community cannot receive supplemental donated food to expand what it gives away because I farm on land in Nikiski instead of inside a commercial building.

The system designed to feed people excluded the farm actually feeding people.

I want you to sit with the specific absurdity of that.

Now let’s talk about what I’ve personally received through partner organizations in my community, the churches and small pantries that did qualify, that paid their fees, that met their requirements, that sent their shoppers and paid their nineteen cents a pound.

I have personally received food distributed through this system that was not fit to give to the families I serve. Moldy produce. Boxes with product that should never have left a warehouse. Food that a hungry family, a senior, a veteran, a mother trying to feed her kids, was apparently expected to be grateful for because need is supposed to lower your standards.

It doesn’t lower mine.

And it shouldn’t lower anyone’s.

Now. The salaries.

Nonprofit executive compensation is public record. IRS Form 990 filings are available to anyone through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. I looked them up. Here is what those documents show, exact figures, public record, sourced directly from federal filings, for food bank leadership across Alaska:

Kenai Peninsula Food Bank, Executive Director 2024: $91,713 2023: $92,962 2022: $84,000 2021: $88,833 2021 federal audit finding: material noncompliance, material weakness in internal controls, significant deficiency in internal controls. Source: Federal Audit Clearinghouse.

Food Bank of Alaska, Anchorage 2024: CEO $115,105 plus $29,360 in additional compensation COO: $111,305. Chief Program Officer: $105,875. Total executive compensation reported: $315,157 in a single year. Annual revenue: $21.7 million. 97.9% from donations. 2020 federal audit finding: material weakness in internal controls.

Fairbanks Community Food Bank, CEO 2024: $99,598 2023: $88,615 2022: $101,831 Reported conflict of interest transactions on federal filings multiple years running.

These are not numbers I invented. These are numbers these organizations reported to the federal government. They are public record. You can look them up yourself at projects.propublica.org/nonprofits.

Now let’s do some math.

Across just these three Alaska food banks, in a state with a total population of roughly 730,000 people, leadership compensation runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Funded almost entirely by public donations and federal grants. While church pantries pay per-pound fees on donated groceries. While grassroots farms get excluded for not having commercial kitchens. While families receive moldy boxes and are expected to be grateful.

And at the top of the entire chain, Feeding America, the national network setting all of these policies, has drawn executive compensation that dwarfs anything you’ll see at the state level. Their filings are public record too. Look them up.

I want to be precise about what I am and am not saying.

I am not saying every person working inside these organizations is indifferent to hungry people. I am not saying food banks do no good. I am not making up numbers or attributing motives I cannot document.

What I am saying, and I will say it as plainly as I know how, is this:

A national system that charges per-pound fees on donated food, erects eligibility barriers that exclude the most grassroots community operations, delivers substandard product to the organizations doing the hardest work, compensates its leadership generously at every level of the chain, and is governed by a national authority that sets policies prioritizing institutional compliance over community access, in my view, based on everything I have documented and personally experienced, does not function as a hunger relief system.

It functions as a hunger management system.

And those are not the same thing.

Hunger relief ends hunger.

Hunger management needs hunger to continue in order to justify its own existence.

I’ll let you decide which one this is.

There’s one more thing I want to say. And I want to say it carefully because it matters.

I donated just over seventy pounds of goat meat to this system. Farm raised. Real protein. Given freely because that’s what I do.

I never received a thank you. Not a call. Not an email. Not a form letter. Nothing.

A year later, still trying to find ways to do more, to expand what Eden’s Edge could give back to this community, I requested the partner application packet.

I read through it and found out I don’t qualify.

So let me make sure I have this right.

This system accepted a donation from my farm.

It just won’t accept my farm.

It took what I grew and gave it away.

It just won’t let me sit at the table.

That’s not a policy oversight. That’s a feature.

Feeding America’s network standards systematically exclude farm operations from partnership, no commercial kitchen, no partner status, while placing no such barrier on accepting farm donations.

They want what farms produce.

They just don’t want farms.

Make of that what you will.

And I’ll say one more thing while I’m at it.

I have personally seen what comes out of those distribution boxes. Produce so far gone it shouldn’t have left the warehouse. Food that required sorting through just to find anything usable.

Which raises a question nobody seems to be asking out loud:

If a system with warehouses, staff, refrigeration, and temperature logs, all those commercial requirements they use to exclude farms like mine, can’t get produce to people before it rots, what exactly are those requirements protecting?

Because from where I’m standing, on a working farm in Nikiski Alaska, with my hands in the dirt and my animals fed and my community showing up at my gate, it looks less like food safety and more like gatekeeping.

A farm that knows how to grow food, harvest it, and get it to people while it’s still good gets excluded.

A warehouse that sends out moldy boxes gets called the system.

Something is wrong with that picture.

Meanwhile Eden’s Edge will keep doing what we do.

No fees. No per-pound charges. No eligibility barriers. No commercial kitchen requirement. No annual application window. No six-figure salaries. No moldy boxes passed off as charity.

Just a disabled woman on a fixed income in Nikiski Alaska, who knows what hunger feels like from both sides of it, raising animals, growing food, and giving it to anyone who needs it because that is what feeding people actually looks like when you strip away the infrastructure and the bureaucracy and the taglines.

Every dollar that comes into this farm goes back into this farm and back into this community.

Every. Single. One.

You can verify that too. Our 990 is public record just like theirs.

We feed people because no one should be hungry.

Prove it.

Dana Eden’s Edge, Nikiski Alaska

All compensation figures are sourced from IRS Form 990 filings publicly available through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. Kenai Peninsula Food Bank EIN: 94-3112445. Food Bank of Alaska EIN: 92-0073175. Fairbanks Community Food Bank EIN: 92-0088266. Audit findings are sourced from the Federal Audit Clearinghouse. Partnership program requirements are sourced from publicly distributed Request for Partnership documentation and publicly available agency partner information on organizational websites. Feeding America per-pound shared maintenance fees are standard network policy documented in partner agency agreements across the country.