I was recently honored to deliver the Keynote Speech at the Junior League of Indianapolis' Women's Leadership Summit, and in light of the 6th anniversary (if we can call it an anniversary - almost sounds too celebratory) of the global shutdown due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, decided to focus my message on radical shifts made in the operational structure of A Longer Table. Below is an excerpt from that speech.

On March 16th, as I was shuttering fourteen restaurants and laying off almost an entire staff, our foundation went from serving 1,000 after school meals a week to 9,000. In one week. But we had a problem. How can you serve after-school meals when there is no school.

Schools were among the first institutions to close during the pandemic, and the children we served relied on school meals for more than half of their daily calories. That statistic is true for all children but for children living in poverty, when schools closed, the safety net called the school cafeteria disappeared. At that moment, we understood that incremental change would not be enough. A radical shift was required. Out of that need, we saw opportunity. 

We had challenges. The majority of schools in Indianapolis had eliminated operational kitchens decades earlier, adopting a heat-and-serve processed food model that became widespread nationally in the 1970s. That was another opportunity. We also knew- I mean, come on, who doesn't know this?- the nutritional quality of these meals served was poor. It basically has the nutritional value of fast food.

Public school cafeterias, taken as a whole, have more locations than and serve more meals a day than Mcdonalds, Starbucks and Chipotle COMBINED, meaning that despite the science that tells us that quality food equals quality results, our school cafeterias are in essence the largest fast food restaurant chain in our country.  

There is a huge social and economic cost to serving cheap food to our youth.
With these new perspectives, we  went  from being helpful to being transformative. 
Today, A Longer Table begins by restoring and modernizing cafeteria kitchens so they are fully operational. We hire and train staff to prepare quality meals from scratch, offering thriving wages, benefits, and real career pathways for our cafeteria employees. We help create a workplace people can be proud to be a part of.

We create a procurement path that offers schools the opportunity to purchase fresh quality ingredients-at no additional cost to the school. Finally, we focus on the students, their parents and their communities, bringing them into the conversations, asking what they need and what they want. I have yet to meet a parent of any of the kids we serve who doesn't want more for their children then they have or who don't want their children to have better lives. 

As a result of this collaboration, ALT serves culturally familiar meals made with quality ingredients and served with dignity. The results are independently measured by the schools we serve, IU Health, Riley Children’s Hospital, and the Indiana Department of Health. 

The data shows better attendance, improved test scores, fewer disciplinary events, fewer visits to the school nurse, reduced absenteeism, greater meal participation and increased parental engagement. That is what moving the needle looks like. 

When we stopped viewing school meals as meal replacement and began seeing school cafeterias as a critical part of academic infrastructure, as a critical part of  public health strategy, and as a critical component of much needed workforce development and culinary pipeline,  we understood what true leadership looked like.

Leadership must be willing to evolve. The traditional model is hierarchical and, in many cases, patriarchal. The old leadership model  preserves institutions as they are, rewards tenure and tradition over the need for measurable change. 

The challenges we face are systems problems, not symptom problems. and systems problems cannot be solved with outdated leadership models. New leadership in philanthropy must be more than data-driven, It must be outcome-driven. It's one thing to be data-literate but it's another to be  data-obsessed. Leadership needs to understand when data needs to take a back seat to empathy. Not everything that can be counted, counts. And leadership must be disciplined enough to evaluate what works, and sunset what does not.

We must  collaborate across sectors. In the case of A Longer Table, we recognized that hunger, health, and education do not exist in isolation. We work with schools, with neighbors, with experts in areas of health, with parents and with the children themselves. We must be willing to share power, to ask who is missing from the table, and to intentionally invest in leaders who do not resemble those who built the existing system. 
Representation is not optics; it is infrastructure. We need to reconcile this: most leaders and organizations today are not struggling because they do not care. They are struggling because they are trying to become leaders (and organizations) that they themselves did not have. Creating without a template is hard.

In philanthropy, as in business, we often speak about ROI, return on investment. Traditionally, that has meant financial value aka profit created by an investment. I'm exhausted by people talking about return on investment. In this next era, ROI must mean more. How about ROI meaning return on individuals. After all, If their outcomes do not improve, then what are we investing in?

ROI should also stand for return on individuals in terms of improving educational access and earning potential, strengthening health trajectories, expanding educational access, and increasing options and opportunities for purpose driven lives. And ROI should represent return on impact: measurable, sustained systems change. Generosity without outcomes is status quo maintenance. Generosity paired with measurable impact is transformation.

Modern leadership is less about authority and more about accountability: accountability to measurable results, to transparency, and to meaningful change. The future will not be defined by how much we give, how many events we host, or how busy we remain. It will be defined by what changes because we were here.