Eric Cooper moved to San Antonio in 2001 to take over the San Antonio Food Bank and get it on the right path. In his time at the SA Food Bank, the non-profit has raise a lot of money, added many programs, and has made it their mission to provide food for today, food for tomorrow and food for a lifetime. Eric Cooper is heartwarming, loving, and genuinely cares about his mission and the San Antonio Food Bank's success.

Transcript:

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Justin Hill: Hello and Bienvenido, San Antonio. Welcome to The Alamo Hour, discussing the people, places, and passion that make our city. My name is Justin Hill, a local attorney, a proud San Antonian, and keeper of chickens and bees. On The Alamo Hour, you'll get to hear from the people that make San Antonio great and unique and the best-kept secret in Texas. We're glad that you're here.

All right. Welcome to The Alamo Hour. Today's guest is Eric Cooper. Eric is the executive director of the San Antonio Food Bank and currently serving in somewhat of a role as a little bit of a national spokesperson for food and security as a result of the crisis and as a result of some press that San Antonio got. He joined the San Antonio Food Bank in 2001 and has since taken it from really being on somewhat of a tenuous footing to really a robust, important, and surprisingly, oddly, well-funded nonprofit in the city.

I was doing some research on you. Before this crisis, 58,000 people a week got help. 77 million meals a year, to me, kind of a nerd about things. 2% overhead for y'alls budget. That's something that unless people really pay attention, you don't realize how important that is and how really a compliment to your management skills. Thank you for being here. I want to get into some of these things, but thank you for being here. I can't imagine your time commitment, so I'm glad we got a little bit of it.

Eric Cooper: Hey, super excited to be on the show. It's a great city and we're just so privileged to be a part of it.

Justin: I think that's a great city. That's why I started this whole thing. You and I were sort of joking how you got these San Antonio stories. I moved here and I've met a weird, fascinating array of characters and I was hoping to share that through this show. We haven't met before, but you're in such a big spotlight right now. I knew about the San Antonio Food Bank. I've learned so much more about it, so I want to talk to you about it. First, I'm going to put you through sort of our top 10 list we go through to get some color commentary on who you are as a person. I've read a bunch of your interviews before you got here today. I want to--

Eric: Sorry about that. [chuckles]

Justin: Well, a lot of it, I don't want to retrace steps. Some of it, I want to get some new information. When and why did you move to San Antonio?

Eric: Well, I've been in food banking for about eight years. I actually got my start in Salt Lake City at the Utah Food Bank and then made my way back home to North Texas. I grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. There was an opportunity to serve with the North Texas Food Bank which, at that time, they had their facility in South Oak Cliff. I was there a couple of years and had watched as the San Antonio Food Bank somewhat struggled. We went through about four CEOs in a two-year period. Two of them had gotten fired and the other two had quit. The board was struggling. The food bank was struggling.

I figured I couldn't screw it up any worse and they offered me the job at that point. I became their youngest executive director. I love an opportunity and I just saw such an opportunity to serve people in need. I knew I was going to dedicate my life towards putting food on the table for families. As I had traveled South Texas and seeing some of our border communities, it's some of the most extreme poverty in the United States. I knew I wanted to serve an area that had that need. When the opportunity arose, the board offered me the position and I had to take it.

Justin: The rest is history. You're still here.

Eric: It is. It seems crazy that now, 19 years ago, we were such a small organization. There's some parts of that that I miss. We had a $1 million cash budget and 18 employees. We were doing about 10 million pounds of food. Today, we got about 250 employees and a $26 million budget.

Justin: Wow.

Eric: We're pushing, hopefully, 75 to 80 million pounds this year. It's been a lot of growth, but it's been stable. San Antonio has just trusted us and built on us. We're feeding a lot of folks. Unfortunately, there's a need. San Antonio had struggled prior to COVID. There's just a super high rate of poverty. When you think about other cities in the United States, San Antonio has, actually, the largest percentage of our population living in poverty, and so COVID just pushed so many new people into that space. Most people don't probably fully understand the poverty line. Man, if you're in poverty, you're really hurting. Those are folks that for a single individual, you're making less than $10,000 a year. If you're making 12,000, 13,000, 14,000 a year, then you're out of poverty. You're not making it, right?

Justin: Right, yes. The working poor.

Eric: The working poor. That's the families. That's kind of our typical client. In this COVID-19 crisis, so many of those families just a paycheck away from being hungry now find themselves in our lines.

Justin: I read a book called Nickel and Dimed. It had to be 20 years ago and it was a fantastic study for-- I was a kid at the time and I read that and thought, "How did these--" It really changed my perspective about people who work because people are always looked down upon who needed assistance. When I read that book, I learned these people are working their butts off and even still, they can't get it together.

I was reading about some of the-- Look, there are good stories that are coming out of this. You're seeing the best in a lot of people. One of the stories I thought was really cute and funny was the girl who gave the lemonade stand money to the food bank. Any other kind of funny stories like that where people have just said, "I don't have much, but here, you can have it"?

Eric: Yes. Again, there's room at the table for everyone to fight hunger. I think the COVID-19 crisis, I've seen just our community at its best where you've got individual philanthropists like Harvey Najim giving three-quarters of a million dollars. USAA giving $1.5 million. Jeff Bezos gave $100 million across the United States to food banks. Just insane generous, kind gifts, but then on the other side, there's this thought that those that have the least sometimes give the most. It's just a fact when it comes to percentage of their earnings what they have the ability to do. I'm just humbled by it. Our food drives along the south side of San Antonio usually bring in a few more cans of food. Little Chloe and her lemonade stand or so many people gave their stimulus checks back.

Justin: Wow.

Eric: Probably, the most humbling was a woman gave $40 and left a note that she actually was in a car in the line on April 9th when we were at Traders Village and served 10,000 families. She said, "I sat in the car. I got the food. The food bank didn't fail me and I was able to nourish myself. The next week, my boss who had laid me off called and said they had a few hours. I could start working." She said, "Knowing that I was going to get a paycheck, I wanted to pay it forward."

Justin: Wow.

Eric: She sent in $40. I think that's really where we sit at the food bank. It's kind of the crossroad between those that have and those that don't have. Those that don't have need a little help, and then those that do have kind of are in this place of caring and sharing. I think they walk away feeling good about the transaction just like those that got the food. It's pretty cool to be in the middle of that.

Justin: Not a lot of unhappy customers.

Eric: No, no.

Justin: Chloe's lemonade stand, it's like a $1,000. I never had that whenever I was a kid. [chuckles]

Eric: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Lemonade, the price went up.

[laughter]

Justin: You're from North Texas. I'm from North Texas. We talked about that before the show. I have friends that come to San Antonio. I haven't lived here as long as you since I was seven for me, but I always say, "Okay. You go to the Alamo. Go do those things, but you need to go see--" Usually, I'll say the Japanese Tea Garden. I think that told me, "Go see the old missions, not just the Alamo." What are some of the hidden gems you tell friends or that you think are really just neat hidden gems of San Antonio?

Eric: I have to first just disclose. Being from North Texas, of course, I'm a Cowboys fan. It just comes with being a Texan, but I was never a Mavericks fan. All those years, I just--

Justin: I was.

Eric: There was the era of the Celtics and Lakers, so I probably was cheering for the Celtics a little bit. Coming to San Antonio, I became a huge Spurs fan. You can't help because they are the real deal. It is just a wonderful tradition of our city. To all those Spurs fans, we're San Antonio proud. I think our mission is very incredible. Most people don't realize that the food bank actually has a partnership with the Mission district, the National Park Service with Mission San Juan.

When the missionaries built the missions, they had the farmland that provided all the food to all of the missions. There was this 10-acre plots of land. They were called Suertes. In Spanish, I guess that's luck and you were in a drawing to get a little parcel. They built the original acequia, which is the oldest water rights in the state of Texas that drafts water off of the San Antonio River and uses that water through topography, irrigate the original farmlands of San Antonio. We had our little 25-acre farm out at the food bank.

It was San Antonio's largest urban farm. The National Park Service reached out and said, "We want to restore this land back to its original farming capacity. We'll give you a 20-year lease for a dollar a year if y'all come work the land. You can have all the water you want. You can use the land and then use those crops to help feed San Antonio's hungry." Just the triple win. Win for them and a win for us and a win for San Antonio families. Definitely, if you're on the Mission Trail, you definitely want to see the San Antonio urban farm at Mission San Juan.

Justin: Are you using the original irrigation structure?

Eric: We are. We are, yes.

Justin: Oh, that's great.

Eric: Yes. There's a portion of it that we totally do it Mission style and then we did install some pumps to expedite some efficiencies. There's some drip irrigation and some of the water conservation work that our farmers use, but--

Justin: Can anybody come out and tour it?

Eric: Man, anytime, any day. If you'd like to get in the dirt, there's always something to be planted or harvested. We've got a pretty good-sized citrus orchard that we're trying to get started out there.

Justin: Any bees?

Eric: There are some bees. It's just a great day. It's a great day to go out. You see the Mission. You see the beauty of the south-side San Antonio River, and then you can work in our farm.

Justin: I didn't know that. I'm learning something new all the time on that, but that's something that's really right up my alley. Are you a reader? If so, what are you reading right now?

Eric: Man, I am just trying to catch up with my emails. [chuckles] I'm a big fan of personal improvement, so Covey, Jim Collins. To be honest, I am so knee-deep in trade publications. I'm definitely a man of faith, so the Scriptures have a part of my literary diet. My wife is the bigger reader. Traveling a bunch, I spend so much time in the car serving 16 counties here in Southwest Texas that I appreciate shows like yours. Podcast, they've become the lazy reader's escape.

I digest a ton, but a big fan of TPR and NPR and just the importance of journalism in today's environment where truth sometimes gets debated. In this COVID-19 crisis, it's interesting because some of what was happening here because of our need and our efforts to try to meet that need, I mentioned on April 9th this experience. Now, we've done pop-ups for forever, 25 years that I've been working in this space.

It's basically a strategy because of refrigeration that you're trying to move a lot of product to families that the bottleneck is some of our supply chain. The ability to inform the families ahead of time that, "We're going to be at this location. Come and get food," then we just load them up in the trunks of their cars. Well, with the COVID-19 protocols, with physical distancing and all that, these pop-ups became the perfect way to get food to families. What typically we'd serve pre-COVID would be about 200 to 400 families. Right at the onset of COVID, it went to about 2,000 families.

Justin: Wow.

Eric: Now, families would go through our website and pre-register. We started to see as we were getting deeper into the crisis. That was probably about the third or fourth week, families' paychecks were gone and we knew that there was a bigger need. We planned on serving 6,000 families, which would be just historic for us at one time. 10,000 families actually ended up showing up. If you can imagine 10,000 families, that's about 50,000 people. We distributed in a day about a million pounds of food.

We had 25 semi-trucks of food that we just blew through trying to make sure families were fed. If it wasn't for hundreds and hundreds of volunteers and a great facility out there at Traders Village, we wouldn't have been able to do it. It was the Express-News that came out just covering the story that captured the images of that day, which we just kind of knew that it was unprecedented the number, but we didn't really realize, I think, what had happened until we all read the paper that night and saw the images like, "Wow. Yes, that's--"

Justin: That's the day those iconic images that went nationwide were taken?

Eric: Yes. It went viral in the sense of, I think, you can't debate a picture, right? That picture just captured, I think, the essence of what was happening across the United States. All food banks, all cities are having these unprecedented lines, but the fact that the photographer captured an image of so many cars parked in a way waiting for food that I think made everybody realize that there's a huge need across America and more needed to be done to feed it.

Justin: We're going to get into more in-depth, but how is the need being filled right now? Are you able to fill the need right now? Has there reached a breaking point or so far so good?

Eric: Yes. We went from feeding the 60,000 people a week pre-COVID to now 120,000 and we just haven't seen any relief. I think we definitely are doing more distributions because we learned it takes all day to serve families if you're doing 10,000, so we try to keep them to about 2,000. We just had one this morning out at Toyota Field. We get done in about an hour and a half if there's 2,000 families. Many more than that, the wait time's great.

Where it's going, we don't know. I think there's estimates I'm hearing from the chamber. It could be 20% to 24% unemployment. Until our hospitality, hard-working, blue-collar community gets back to work, I think the food bank's going to see a lot more clients than we ever have. We're going to do all we can to meet that need. You asked about food supply. Pretty much for eight weeks, it's been private donations.

It's been residents that have funded and supported our response. I've pushed and pushed on city, state, federal support to come our way and they heard it. They responded, but it's less nimble and so we still are in the process of landing the state support. They funded, through the Texas Department of Emergency Management, $9.1 million to purchase food, which for us will mean several hundred semi-truck loads of product. To put it in perspective, that's about 50% of our food for a 30-day period.

We blow through it pretty quickly when we're feeding the number of families we're feeding, which, I think, hid it in the beginning is, I don't think people realize the food bank on a normal take will go through about $125 million in food in 12 months. That's what it took to feed 60,000 people a week. Our budget today if you're thinking on a 12-month period, we'd need about $250 million in food. That's just tough to get out of our community, that much support. For eight weeks here in our city of San Antonio, this city stepped up in a major way and people were fed.

Justin: Oh, I had Ron Nirenberg on, I guess, two guests ago in his little birthday fundraiser. I think he tried to reach a thousand and it ended up being 64,000. [chuckles]

Eric: Yes. No. Shea Serrano raised $100,000. I don't know if you know GP Singh, but he raised, I don't know, like quarter of a million. Jose Menendez raised, I think, $400,000. Harvey Najim and the community, through the help of WAI and Fox KABB, raised $5.4 million. It's been humbling. It's been mind-blowing, but you're like, "Man, where will the future be in fundraising?" because we're consuming so much of it and spending so much of it that so many nonprofits are hurting. I feel it. We do a lot of special-event fundraising at the food bank.

We've got a golf tournament, a gala, a 5K, all that kind of stuff and all that's gone.You don't have events in the current environment. We had to cancel some of our fundraisers, but our cities stood up and supported us. We figured out the volunteer components. Still, hundreds of volunteers come in every day to help us. We have strong COVID protocols. If listeners are interested in coming out and volunteering, either at a distribution or at the warehouse, in our kitchens or even on the farm, just give us a call or visit us online at safoodbank.org and we'll put you to work.

Justin: That was going to be one of my questions. Is the bigger challenge right now getting manpower or money?

Eric: All is always a challenge. I think food is actually, probably one of our biggest challenges just because of the supply chain being altered. Most people, unless you're a food bank nerd, food is on two sides. There's the retail side which is groceries and then the foodservice side which is restaurants. The foodservice side, because at closures, basically bottlenecked everything.

Nobody could go out and eat and so everybody was grocery shopping and we all saw the empty shelves at H-E-B and...