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After 21 years, Sara Waggoner is retiring as executive director of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. In her wake, she leaves an organization that has seen significant growth — in its square footage and employees and volunteers, as well as the community need it serves.
In her 21 years at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, Sara Waggoner, shown in the food bank’s distribution center with turkeys donated for the holiday season, has seen the organization grow from distributing about 3 million pounds of food a year to just under 17 million.
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When Sara Waggoner became executive director of the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma, it had eight employees and distributed about 3 million pounds of food a year.
As she leaves 21 years later, it has 48 employees, thousands of volunteer workers and last year distributed just under 17 million pounds of food.
She has also directed an expansion into a sophisticated $10.2 million facility with 72,000 square feet of storage, including a freezer big enough for a tractor-trailer truck. That facility, financed by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, triggered much of the expansion.
The food bank has always served 24 counties of eastern Oklahoma, from Kansas to Texas. It began in 1981, started by Neighbor for Neighbor, but was incorporated the next year as a separate nonprofit entity. Bill Major was its first director, and while its name included Eastern Oklahoma, its focus was primarily in Tulsa.
That began to change in 1990, when Waggoner came aboard, and accelerated when the new facility provided new opportunities.
Waggoner had directed a food bank in Columbia, S.C., for seven years when she applied in Tulsa (she wanted to be closer to her parents, who had retired to northwest Arkansas). The food bank had many applicants when Major left for other business opportunities, but Waggoner “was head and shoulders above any other applicant,” says Judi McCoy, who chaired the committee screening them. “She was clearly the one for us. … She was the perfect person.”
Now, McCoy says, “It has been a really good match. She took us to the next level. She instituted and promoted programs that were really new.”
Among them is the Food for Kids Backpack Program, which supplies weekend food for children in elementary school food programs who might otherwise not have good meals on weekends. It has grown from four schools in 2005 to more than 200.
The biggest change, Waggoner says, was the new facility. It not only provided more space to store food, but it also included a culinary kitchen. That, Waggoner says, has been a major factor in reducing waste and helping promote activities of the food bank.
In the former facility, about 30 percent of donated fresh produce had to be discarded because it went bad before it could be distributed. With the kitchen came a program of “value-added processing,” in which perishable food is cooked or converted into meals or foodstuffs that can be frozen and preserved.
Last year that program produced nearly 30,000 pounds of frozen foods for distribution. It produced nearly 12,000 pounds the first two months of this fiscal year.
That cut the fresh produce waste to about 5 percent. It’s now only about 3 percent because the food bank donates compostable material to Global Gardens, a Tulsa elementary and middle school program that focuses on gardening and peace education as avenues for community development. The program uses the food bank waste to make compost for its community garden projects.
The kitchen also enabled a monthly Recipe to End Hunger celebrity chef dinner and other functions, which have helped raise awareness of food bank services.
Just 48 employees work in the areas of food distribution, the culinary center, food solicitation and programming for the $5 million-a-year agency. They are backed by more than 10,000 volunteers.
