A CALL TO SERVICE, FEEDING THE POOR

After reuniting with his homeless father on the streets of Portland, Ore., Eric Cooper abandoned the business of profit-making — he owned multiple businesses — for the business of running food banks.

Cooper’s father lived on food that a local businesswoman donated. While Cooper never met her, he was inspired by her generosity.

As president and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank, Cooper, 49, is responsible for securing funding for the nonprofit that feeds 58,000 people per week across16 counties in Southwest Texas. In 2017, the food bank brought in more than $150 million, according to its federal tax return from that year.

Cooper said the food bank puts 98 cents of every dollar it earns back into organization programming. In 2017, the food bank spent over $140 million.

While the food bank receives more than 1 million pounds of donated goods each week, the organization also offers job training and has connected people with $100 million worth of benefits.

Cooper has been CEO for nearly two decades. Before moving to San Antonio, he worked at food banks in Utah and Dallas, adding up to a total of 25 years in the industry.

He studied business at the University of Utah. His pre-food bank ventures ranged from clothes cleaning to booking air travel to leasing properties. While Cooper was an entrepreneur, he said he always had a heart for service.

He spoke with the San Antonio Express-News at his office at the food bank. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Did your college education affect the career you ultimately decided on?

A: It really didn’t. I thought that I would work in business, and so I pursued a business degree. Then I had a small business and was working and running the business, and going to school at the same time. I knew the goal was to get my degree, but I knew it might not have a big impact in getting me a job.

I had this life experience where my father, who I was estranged from, came back into my life after I searched for him. I actually found him in Oregon, homeless. It was finding him on the streets in Portland that shaped my life in a way that made me think we’re all connected.

Q: How did you find your father?

A: When I was leaving home to go off to college, my parents got divorced. My dad moved from Argyle, Texas, to Portland, Oregon, and had left my mom with my little brother and sister. She had been a housewife and hadn’t worked outside the home, so she was trying to figure out how to pay the bills and all of that.

My dad became a deadbeat dad. He didn’t send child support. I was doing what I could to help her. I was frustrated that he had shirked his responsibilities and left them in a bad way.

Two years went by and we hadn’t communicated. I thought, “I’m going to give him an earful. He shouldn’t have done this.” Watching my mom and my little brother and sister struggle made me start looking for him. My mom knew the business he went to work for, but didn’t really know anything other than that. I called them, and he hadn’t worked there for about a year and a half.

I was calling the IRS. I called some apartments that he lived at, and really no one had any info. I called the local police department thinking he was maybe a missing person. They just said, “No, you might want to hire a private detective.”

I thought, “Well, I could maybe look myself.” I filled a suitcase full of flyers with his photo on it and flew to Portland.

I rented a car and I went to some apartments he had once lived at and just started knocking on doors. After about half a day, I met this woman who knew my dad and thought he worked at a gas station.

I went there, and he didn’t work there anymore. But they thought maybe he worked at this transmission shop. I drove over there, but it was closed. When I saw the closed sign hanging in the window I was like, “Oh, my journey has come to an end.” It really rocked me. I remember thinking, “Did I really think he was still in Oregon? He could be anywhere.”

Sitting in the car, I said a word of prayer like, “Just help me find him.” There was this alleyway between this transmission shop and an old building. There was a homeless guy who was walking across the alleyway. When I looked at him, I realized it was my dad.

I watched him for a minute and then just got out of the car and yelled, “Dad.” He looked up and then just came running to me. He got to me and he said, “Son, I knew you would come.” I’m like, “You look hungry.” He said, “I am.”

He jumped in the car, and I drove to Denny’s. This is where my life changed. We were greeted by a hostess at the Denny’s who acknowledged me, then looked at my dad, but then quickly looked back at me and asked if I wanted a table for one.

My heart broke. I knew why she said that. She saw me as some young kid, and she saw my dad as a homeless bum. But he wasn’t a bum to me.

Q: How had he been living?

A: He lived in this little abandoned camper trailer behind that transmission shop. No running water or electricity. He said, “I have to be careful. No one knows I’m there because the police will shoo me off. But I do work at the transmission shop from time to time. You can call them, and they’ll get me on the phone.”

I asked, “How do you eat?” He told me about this woman who had a catering business and that she provided food to individuals on the street. He said he had become the beneficiary of her kindness.

So I flew home from Portland, way screwed up.

I had just transitioned and had sold a business, and I was in this place where I could be called to this work. I really do feel like it was a call. I feel like I had this experience to shape me — to give me understanding. Through my efforts in business, I started learning and was positioned in those businesses to meet some influential people.

Q: Where was the first food bank that you worked at?

A: It was the Utah Food Bank in Salt Lake City. I had gone to Utah for college, and that’s where I had started my business. I worked at that food bank for six years, and then moved to back to North Texas, where I’d gone to high school and grew up. I worked for the North Texas Food Bank at South Oak Cliff and in South Dallas for a couple of years.

That’s where I learned about the opportunities in San Antonio. The food bank in San Antonio had struggled. They’d gone through four executives in a two-year period and had struggled financially. I joke that I couldn’t screw it up any worse than it already was.

The board gave me an opportunity to lead. I had been the No. 2 person in Utah, and worked to develop a lot of successful strategies in Dallas. I wanted to help a community that really had unmet needs.

Our service territory connects to a lot of border counties with real high rates of poverty. In fact, one of our counties ranks as one with the highest number of children who are food insecure. I just knew I needed to dedicate my life to this work and go where some of the highest need was.

I think that the success that I’ve had has come collectively because of the success of an amazing, passionate team of employees that work tirelessly on behalf of this mission.

Q: What are some of the key programs you’ve started at the San Antonio Food Bank?

A: I think the way we’ve framed our work, it’s really about a three-tier strategy that we call “food for today, food for tomorrow and food for a lifetime.” Food for today is really when someone’s refrigerator’s empty. We want to connect them immediately to food — get them the groceries that nourish them and their family.

But there’s an opportunity then to talk about food for tomorrow. Our staff work with those needing help to apply for public benefits, including programs like SNAP (the program acronym for food stamps) or WIC.

There’s lots of great programs that sometimes go underutilized because families don’t know how to navigate the application process. The food bank helps to connect families to those benefits, and that’s where we’re drawing $100 million in benefits for the clients to stabilize their households.

Our last work is really in the food for a lifetime space, which is really about meaningful employment. We have training programs in culinary arts and warehousing to give people skills to find employment. Then we also have employment services that’s dedicated just to getting people jobs.

It’s that today, tomorrow and a lifetime strategy that helps to move people to self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and gives them resources so they might start to procure their own food, being less reliant on us but benefiting from a federal program or income from a job.

The last little bit of food for a lifetime is our nutrition education. We all need to be making healthier choices and consuming more fresh fruits and vegetables, drinking more water and preparing food at home. Restoring the power of the dinner table for many households is a critical work in a food bank.

But like I said, it’s much more complex than providing just a meal. It’s shaping the conscience and minds of our community to have more CEOs of conscience and more businesses dedicated to sustainability for their employees, along with sustainability of their business.

Q: How do your day-to-day responsibilities help you to meet those goals for the food bank?

A: Day-to-day is really about making sure that we’re creating enough revenue through donations of dollars and food and volunteers.

There’s not a lot of difference between the for-profit companies that I ran and a nonprofit. If you don’t have enough income, you can’t meet your expenses. The stress of any CEO of a nonprofit is making sure that you have enough revenue or income to be able to fulfill your mission.

But then you want to make sure that on the program side you’re delivering for the community. You want to make sure you’re providing value and you’re moving people forward.

People will use that parable, “If you give a man a fish, you’ve fed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you’ve fed them for a lifetime.” Sometimes I’ll hear people talk about teaching a person to fish as the more noble work.

I believe that if you don’t pack a tuna fish sandwich, she won’t meet you at the dock. She wants to learn how to fish, but her babies are hungry. Unless she takes care of those basic needs, she can’t go out and start to develop those self-sufficiency strategies. You have to have a tandem approach. It has to be stabilizing while moving forward. I think that’s the approach we try to have here at the food bank.