Cathy McCann had recently left a successful logistics career at Pepsi to work in hunger relief, when a mutual friend connected her with Kathleen DiChiara. Cathy’s skills and dedication met Kathleen’s conviction and boundless energy, and the rest is history. Kathleen convinced her to “join us for six months – and then we will sit down for an evaluation.” But that evaluation never happened, and for thirty-five years Cathy had helped to build CFBNJ as we know it today.
When Cathy joined in 1984, Kathleen had recently rented CFBNJ’s first warehouse in Newark. The entire staff consisted of five people, plus a retiree who did odd jobs and a part-time truck driver. There was no money for them to purchase their own truck, so they rented or borrowed one when they could. The building was old, the floor tiled and broken. The space was so narrow that everything had to be loaded by hand – they had no forklifts or pallet jacks in those days.
Cathy remembered, “If a delivery came in, every single employee stopped whatever they were doing to carry food through case by case by case, like a bucket brigade in a fire.”
Cathy and Kathleen bonded over their willingness to roll up their sleeves and “figure it out.”
“Kathleen never asked anyone to do something she wouldn’t do herself,” Cathy said. “If the toilet got stopped up, Kathleen would fix it.”
Food banking was a new movement, and Cathy helped develop the system CFBNJ used to track and provide food. A list was typed every day of what food was in the warehouse, and the agencies wrote out food orders by hand. Where the food went was listed on written cards, using carbon paper for record keeping. Every day was something new, and every decision was an experiment.
Cathy shared, “I learned pretty quickly that Kathleen needed to just try it her way and see what happened.” Yet in that first year together, they moved a million pounds of food.
Cathy found it “an inspiration to watch Kathleen. She was fearless – she would go anywhere, and she would ask anyone for anything. Kathleen was a woman on a mission. She wouldn’t let anyone stop her.”
During Operation Desert Storm in 1992, an enormous supply of surplus food was sitting at Port Newark. There was difficulty getting it out of the Port, for labor reasons. But of course, Kathleen was determined to have it, so she went down to the Port and “cozied up to those crusty old longshoremen and got them to listen, and to help.”
To Cathy, “giving and getting back is everything.” She says that Kathleen had a way of “making sure everyone on the staff knew that even on a bad day, they had helped someone.”
She loved going home from work every day, knowing that together she and her staff had made the world a little bit better. She looks back on her long career “with gratitude for the meaning that my work at CFBNJ gave to my life.”