Name
Strategically Leading the Mission: Feed Hungry People Today and Work to End Hunger Tomorrow.
Date
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Time
11:05 AM - 12:05 PM
Speakers
Description
For Harvesters-The Community Food Network initial response to the Covid pandemic was an all-consuming focus on meeting the crisis—feeding the thousands of individuals and families whose livelihoods had been decimated by the virus. The response demanded rapid fire overhaul of operational tactics at every level of the organization, the ability to work on the fly to launch collaborative programs, often with new, untested partners, and an unprecedented ongoing push to secure food and financial support to meet the need. At the same time, Covid crystallized understanding of the depth and breadth of disparity in the community, elevating awareness that people living in poverty--overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic, immigrant, LGBTQ+, elderly--were bearing the worst impacts of the pandemic. Harvesters recognized they were successfully fulfilling the first half of their mission--feeding people today. While this work resolved an immediate, critical problem, questions grew inside the organization about whether they were doing enough to advance the second half of their mission—working to end hunger tomorrow—through more active efforts to address the underlying causes of poverty and disparity. In this session, you’ll learn how an organization under pressure on the frontlines of crisis response was able to fast-track large and complex changes in operations to exponentially grow its service capacity, while simultaneously using pandemic lessons to launch discussion and recalibration of strategy intended to literally change the trajectory of life for those they serve.
How does this session align with the conference theme "Strategy in a 'Right Now' World" and topic areas
A wise man once said leaders must be both microscopic and telescopic, needing both the ability to keep the wheels of an organization turning day to day, and the knack for scanning the horizon to prepare for the future. The Harvesters experience, meeting the needs of the “right now” while embracing a future focus and the ability to embrace change, embodies this reality. The session addresses several key activities of strategy: Strategy Formulation: The session will address how Harvesters leaders and staff came together to revise existing strategies and tactics in a pressure-cooker environment and how communication and organizational culture helped Harvesters adapt to crisis. The session will also explore how Harvesters is using a comprehensive environmental assessment, involving broad and deep feedback from internal and external stakeholders to inform development of its next strategic plan. This information gathering process revealed that while most people in the community recognized Harvesters for work to feed hungry people very few saw them advancing efforts to end hunger tomorrow. These insights provided “data” helpful to discussion about how to strategically balance the meeting “right now” needs of hungry people with the long-term goal of changing lives and ending hunger tomorrow. Strategic Transformation: How Harvesters adjusted its structure, capital, workforce, technology and organizational culture to meet community demand and the lessons the organization learned from that experience that are informing its planning for the future. Strategy Engagement: The culture inside Harvesters was largely focused on the feeding hungry people, a focus that only grew stronger during Covid. Shifting that culture to thinking more long term and more upstream in terms of addressing root causes of hunger is an explicit part of the conversation and planning process. The session will address how Harvesters is addressing culture as part of both strategy formulation and ongoing strategy management.