Richard LeBer, with his orange Harry Chapin Food Bank ballcap, is a beacon during my visit to the Fort Myers hunger-relief site that’s already fed more than 2.3 million Southwest Floridians this year. Volunteers and staff know his name, and he theirs. It takes us some time to get through the tour, but I’m grateful for lulls in the conversation and the opportunity to let the full scale of the 55,000-square-foot warehouse sink in. Richard points to cardboard-clad meal kits sorted on shelves towering up to the ceiling, ready to ship. He shows me the freezers and fridges stocked with produce, juices, and meats from local grocery stores.
Overhead, the roof still shows signs of Hurricane Ian peeling it back like the lid of a sardine can. The storm, which more than doubled the group’s work, has been one of Richard’s biggest challenges since taking over as president and CEO in 2016. And, that’s considering his team navigated the onslaught of need from Hurricane Irma and COVID-19. But Richard just focuses on meeting the need. “You do what you have to do because there are people out there who need you,” he says. The Harvard Business School graduate preceded his time in Southwest Florida as interim executive director of the Florida Association of Food Banks and vice president at the Atlanta Community Food Bank. Feeding people wasn’t something he sought out; it’s more like the work found him. “I learned how prevalent hunger is and became more and more appalled that in the United States, in the 21st century, that could possibly be the case. Why should anybody ever have to go hungry?” he says.
After weathering Hurricane Irma in 2017, Richard adjusted the organization to be more proactive ahead of major storms. When Ian hit, Harry Chapin had the mechanisms in place to act fast. The food bank entered a complex dance of coordination. Most of their distributions occur through about 170 partner organizations across five counties. About half of those organizations came online in the first week. Harry Chapin swiftly routed 15 to 20 tractor-trailers of supplies daily where needed.
That’s thanks, at least in part, to Richard. In those fraught days after Ian’s devastation, when Richard wasn’t stationed at one of the distribution sites, he drove around. He wanted to see for himself where the damage was, who was hurting, who had a need and how his team could meet it. In the week before the storm, Harry Chapin distributed 400,000 pounds of food. The week after: 1.4 million pounds, totaling more than a million mouths fed. Richard is preparing for their food distribution to nearly double to 50 million pounds annually in the coming years. With an expanding population comes an expanding need, he explains.
Talking about the food bank’s success in recent years, Richard almost always defers to his team of 80 staffers and about 4,000 volunteers—some of whom surround us, motoring forklifts and sorting canned goods as we walk through the warehouse. But Richard is the figurehead, making community connections, doing TV interviews to generate interest and new partnerships, talking with emergency management centers, and pinpointing gaps in the system that Harry Chapin can backfill. “Everybody, everybody, everybody has an occasional lousy Monday morning,” Richard says. “But I never have a day where I don’t know in my soul that I’m doing work that’s worthwhile.” — A.A.