Robert Egger’s amazing journey from night clubs to soup kitchens

Robert Egger didn’t start off trying to feed the poor; his big goal was creating the coolest nightclub in D.C. – or anywhere. Right out of high school he landed a job at a small D.C. nightclub (the late, and much-missed Childe Harold), where no less than Bruce Springsteen played his first gig in DC.  He spent 10 years in the music biz – editing a local music magazine, managing clubs, booking bands – having a great time and planning to use the power of music to take over the world.  Then he and his fiance went looking for a church to marry them and found Grace Church – the cheapest and “least snooty” of the bunch.

Somehow the couple got “cornered” into volunteering for the church’s feed-the-homeless program and after one rainy night handing out food to people wondered, “Where were the social workers, the homeless shelter partners, the drug counselors, the incentives to help these people get out of their situation, or at least out of the friggin’ rain?” “And why were they buying food from the Safeway, distributing it to people standing in the rain, anyway?

From his years in the club business Egger knew that restaurants throw food away all the time – and hate doing that!  So he got the notion to collect extra restaurant food centrally somewhere, then serve it to people indoors somewhere.  Also part of the vision was to go beyond just feeding the poor to reducing the numbers of people people by providing job training, too.

By 1988 Robert had managed to get a $25,000 grant for a refrigerator truck, and with the inauguration of George H. W. Bush coming up soon, he called the new administration, asked if he could take the left-over food from the Inauguration, got a big yes, and the D.C. Central Kitchen launched that very day, going on to provide 40,000 pounds of food in that first year.

Going National

Egger and his team have spread the  word and now 60 other cities have similar programs, and it’s even spread to campuses with its Campus Kitchens Project.  (Yes, there ARE poor people around colleges, he discovered, starting with people struggling to pay for that education.)

Beyond promoting better food services for the poor, Egger tackles the much bigger topic of how to manage nonprofits more efficiently ( – one part of that message being that lots of them need to just shut down and stop ciphering off precious resources.   On Youtube I heard him talk about the importance of transparency, and give a terrific defense of people who work for nonprofits against a high-profile attack on them (as “idiots”).  He also wrote Begging for Change about how to manage nonprofits better, and there’s more about all this on his blog “Piece of Mind”.

Turning down the Big Bucks

I’ll share my favorite Egger story, first told to me by a mutual friend and big admirer of his.  When the DC branch of United Way was racked with financial scandal at the top, Egger agreed to take the helm for a year, using his his reputation and organizational savvy to save funding for hundreds of local nonprofits.  But rather than taking the same $225,000 yearly salary earned by the ousted executive, he agreed to take no more than $85,000 (up from his Central Kitchen pay of $60,000).  That, despite being urged by United Way insiders to take “at least $125,000″  so as not to unduly threaten the whole pay scale!

About Boomers

I met Egger at a dinner and screening of the documentary Truck Farm to benefit the Neighborhood Farm Initiative and asked him what changes he was seeing – lots more young people interested in growing food?  Well yeah, he says, but as he sees it, even more popular than growing food is community.   He’s witnessing armies of youth coming to the cause because they’ve grown up in a culture of service, and  armies of Boomers looking for redemption and a return to the garden.”  Encouraging to hear.

Tagged as: Begging for Change, DC Central Kitchen, Rogert Egger

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