- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS Tampa St. Petersburg Sarasota.

- Affluence is on the rise.

One outta three households in Tampa Bay now earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, and it's a good thing too, because that's just about what it costs for the average family of four to live comfortably in this area.

But that also means there are millions of people who struggle to make ends meet some more than others.

In West Central Florida, it's estimated that one in six people face hunger and among children, it's one in four.

You're about to meet the CEO of a dynamic operation that's tackling this growing challenge.

Next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- [Narrator] Suncoast Business Forum, brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available@raymondjames.com.

(upbeat music) - Hopefully, you'll never be in a position where you have to choose whether to pay your rent and utilities or whether to buy food.

If you or a family member were in that situation, would you know where to turn?

Food insecurity is an invisible problem that affects more folks than we realize.

Feeding Tampa Bay, CEO, Thomas Mantz and his dedicated team are passionate about feeding those in need and uplifting our community.

Thomas, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- I'm really glad to be here, Jeff.

Thanks for having us in.

- It's great having you.

Now, feeding Tampa Bay has been in this area for 40 years.

- 42.

- 42 years.

And during that time, this area has really grown, economically expanded.

Now, back in 2012, you were serving about 15 million meals a year.

In the last 10 years to 2023, you've actually increased that to about 90 million a year.

That's a sixfold increase.

What has led to this enormous growth in need?

- Well, I think it speaks to probably two sides of an issue.

One is I, I think our organization has worked really hard to improve service into the community.

I think anybody that's in the business that we are in wants to grow our capacity and capability, create better outputs and then hopefully outcomes.

I think the other thing that it speaks to, and this is something that I shared with our board last year, what business has increased its output sixfold, but as a percentage against need, we're further behind.

I think this is one of the things that communities have to reconcile is that organizations like ours and many other in, in others in Tampa are doing heroic work against a problem that is growing at a greater pace than we'll ever be able to keep up with.

The question often asked of us is, well, the unemployment rate is really good, right?

We would agree with that.

That's a wonderful number to have that low.

But the reality is we're dealing with a wages issue and the average family going back to your a hundred thousand dollars a year in your open, the average family of four in the state of Florida needs around 91 or $92,000 just for a survival budget.

Nobody's going on vacation.

Nobody's shop shopping, sprees, just survival.

The average family in the state of Florida earns about 58,000.

Family of four, earns about $58,000 a year.

There in lies your gap in your trouble, and we know this because again, you just read any news story and you see the choices that families are having to make, and I think that's the part we have to reconcile as a community is understanding that most people that come and use our services are hardworking, invested in their responsibilities are a part of our economy, most likely work, and are important member of your their...

If you're a business, they're either your customer or your colleague, and I think these are the things that we have to understand that are happening.

We can share stories.

One of my stories from being in this work is a bunch of high school kids were volunteering distributing food, and one of their teachers came and got in line.

Imagine that moment for that child, but also consider that for a moment to say, well, wait a minute.

We want our educators to be in a place where they're accessing food and other services.

I think these are the things that communities have to say, wait a minute, let's rethink who's here, and then more importantly why they're here.

- Our communities doing just that?

Are they looking at it as you're saying and saying, why do we have this problem?

Why is it increasing?

- I would argue that right now, the responsibility falls way too far on the shoulders of the nonprofit community, and I can tell you, we will never be able to answer that demand.

I think communities that, that are successful, we'll have three distinguished elements that are pulling equally towards the problem.

One is the nonprofit community who's trying to do the work that we do.

Number two is the legislators and appointed to enact and put in place thoughtful policy that leads to long-term solutions.

And the third is the corporate community who as I said, either customers or colleagues are a part of that.

If all three of those share equal responsibility, I'm ever hopeful the problem does get solved.

- Feeding Tampa Bay has an annual budget approaching $200 million, making it one of the largest nonprofits in the state of Florida.

Now about 150 million or 75% of that is donated food.

- Value of, yeah.

- How do you source all the food that that you're providing?

- If you go back to the premise of why food banks were built, and I think this is also the premise of charity that you really want to about, charity was always built to step between excess opportunity or capability and need, and food was the perfect example of that.

The founder of the Food Bank movement understood that there was excess food and grocery stores, manufacturers, farmers, retailers.

There was food that wasn't getting consumed, it was ending up in landfill.

He figured out, "Hey, I can do something about this."

He brought that food back to his local church, St. Mary's Church in Phoenix, Arizona, the first food bank, and he started a movement, which we follow today, which is there excess resource that Jeff, that would otherwise end up in landfill.

That we go out and collect every day.

We take those food items.

We then in turn manage those back into the community of deed through a partnership of about 450 different agency partners that we work with.

Everybody that knows a local church or nonprofit agency or school or boys and girls club, or YMCA that distribute food, it usually comes through us.

We view our role as a convener and right?

We convene or leverage resources together and then try and bring as many folks into that process as possible.

So who might come into that process?

Well, as we mentioned a moment ago, it could be a food donor that says, Hey, I don't want to throw away food.

Can you take that for us?

But it can also be someone who provides financial resources to us.

It can also be a volunteer.

Think about an organization like ours.

We're volunteer led.

50 plus thousand people will donate their labor to us in a year.

That's an incredibly important part of our capability, but you also have other partners who are offering ancillary services and ways of connecting to those resources to ours, and then moving it back out into the community.

So think about it this way, in its simplest form, when someone comes to see us for food, that is a symptom of the underlying problem.

It is not the problem itself.

The problem itself is economic instability for a variety of different reasons.

When we answer the food question and say, okay, here's what you need as an intervention to make sure you're okay with food for the next few days, and we bring other partners around that, that offer, how do you make sure that you can get transportation or rent or healthcare or other services?

We then start to move into a place where we're not talking about short term, we're talking about long term.

We've moved from intervention into prevention.

- You've just moved into a 200,000 plus square foot new facility.

You refer to it as a hub of opportunity.

- Yes.

- Tell us about this new facility, this new hub of opportunity, and how it's going to impact.

- This facility's unique in our industry.

It's a much different way of thinking.

As we would say internally, we could have built a food bank that moved food.

We built a community center that could move people, and that was our ultimate goal was, to create a community center around which a lot of different elements, both new and old, could come together again to the betterment of the community.

We built a big area to take care of food, produce, all those kind of things.

But we also built in a lot of space for education, for community gatherings, for partnerships, restaurant, grocery store.

All of those will be resident in one place, so that, again we create a vision that is far different.

Almost half of all the people space in that building is dedicated to partners and programs that will lift and create long term outcomes.

- Feeding Tampa Bay has substantial economic impact on the greater Tampa Bay area.

Tell us about that.

- Yeah, I think I was gonna note that before.

I think if folks wanna understand, you mentioned what's on our tax form, our 990, but if you measure economic input, the true value, retail value of the food, all of the other impact, Rollins College did a study that helped food banks like ours understand our true economic impact, and we are north of 350 to $400 million a year in valued impact provided into the community.

And this new facility that will go much higher because our capacity, right?

So stop and think about that for a moment.

In terms of size and scope of our ability, you might look at us and say, well, well done feeding Tampa Bay.

Thank you.

What we would say is, why are we in a situation where we have to create that much economic impact that families aren't okay, and that we're having to supply that level of support?

- Let's talk about your formative years.

Let's talk about you as a kid.

And growing up.

- I was a kid that just simply wanted to earn his own way.

I'm still of an age where that was an important part.

I started working, started delivering newspapers at 10 years old, cutting lawn at 12 years old.

And those were appreciated opportunities, right?

I was glad to be able to do that.

Our family was, you know, solidly lower middle class comfortably.

We didn't have or want for much, but we were told very early on, you're gonna earn your own way in this.

Right?

That's how this works.

And so I was of that mindset and idea that I wanted to simply make sure that I could earn my keep and, and build my own life.

And so I was a kid that was not a good student.

I was not well fit in that situation.

I probably had greater interest in other things.

I probably, in many ways, Jeff would've thought that I was intellectually inferior to a lot of my schoolmates, because school did not come easily to me.

The facility of studying the capability of all of that, it wasn't a venue that I enjoyed at that age.

I think there were a lot of other pressures I learned about, but the reality was, the moment I got outta high school, I went to work full time.

I was anxious to get a job and get started.

And probably if there's one thing that distinguished my career throughout my formative, before I came into the nonprofit world, my formative career, I was willing to outwork everybody else.

I only knew my father's credo, which said, they don't have to give you a job.

I came into the job environment in 1981, if you recall, economically at that time, it was a really difficult economic stretch.

Finding a job was a hard thing.

I worked two or three jobs, one in a day, one at night, one on weekends.

That helped kind of cover my expenses.

The other thing that I found probably was I had a facility in two areas that were helpful to me.

One is I could pretty quickly diagnose or understand what the circumstances of a particular situation were.

So what I wasn't as much was book smart.

I probably just had more savvy around understanding people circumstances, being able to look at and see something.

The other thing that I probably had, which was very helpful, was I was a pretty good communicator.

I could under, you know, articulate, right?

And so I wouldn't have known that those were skills that I had until much later.

But that's how I started my career I just got my first job and started working.

- Your first job outta high school was working for AT&T, which was a large, very large diversified telecommunications company at that time.

But you didn't work in telecommunications?

- No, I worked as an entry level.

I got an entry level job office assistant, I think, and I think assistant would've been a step up.

And so I delivered mail.

I sorted, I stacked, I ran errands, I did whatever, you know, they needed someone to do.

I served an area of about 35 or 40 folks in that department, made sure that their wants and needs were met.

And I stayed in the AT&T world for the better part of 10 plus years.

- But you weren't in telecommunications you were in financial services.

Most people don't even realize AT&T has that business.

- There's somebody out there that still has AT&T credit card, right when they were in that business.

But yeah, they were at that point, they had a pretty big sizable financial services arena that they were in.

And it was a unique part of their business model.

At the time I worked for AT&T they were the largest corporation in the world, which is funny for people to think today.

But I remember the day I got hired, they said, here's a way to think about AT&T, either you know someone who directly works for AT&T or you know, someone who knows someone that does.

Right?

There were a lot of folks that worked there, and they had this particular division.

And so I ended up in that business, very different world.

But what I learned about and what I learned about me, but what I learned about was how to manage, how to lead, how to create solutions, how to build capacity and capability.

There are parts of the job that I love that I would like to think that I excelled at particularly building organization systems, but most notably probably I really prided myself on being a person that was able to identify talent and help them live into that talent.

- In the 1980s, 1990s, financial services was growing rapidly.

It was both in the US and overseas.

And this provided you opportunities both in the US and overseas, right?

- Right.

So by the time I was probably in my lower thirties, younger thirties, on to mid thirties, I was working on Wall Street with a particular bank.

And at that time, the Soviet Union had become Russia, and there was significant change in that environment.

So much so that they wanted to bring in Western partners to help understand how to stabilize and then capitalize their infrastructure.

And so our bank bid on a contract to go over there and provide a particular service.

And so I was offered the opportunity to go over and live and work in Russia, which I did for the better part of a couple, almost three years.

And I recall vividly the first moment I stood in Red Square thinking I could not have ever imagined being there.

It was just inconceivable to me.

And as I traverse different parts of Moscow and other parts of the country, it was just a fascinating study in a culture that was very different than you or I ever would've perceived.

Our sense of them was this formidable opponent who had a might in power that would overwhelm us, when you got inside of their country, it was a country that was in shambles, depending on who you believe.

Part of the reason why the Soviet Union fell was because their infrastructure crumbled.

So we came over there to help them rebuild it.

And so I was a part of building, putting in place a company that handled their financial services, hired local Russian folks, and built a business there.

That stood for a long time as they kind of tried to figure out how to navigate a post-Soviet world.

- In 2000, after 17 years in financial services and in the corporate world, you pivoted, you decided to go into the nonprofit sector and you were the president of a company called Dignity U Wear Foundation.

- Yeah.

You know, I think as you going back to the motif of some of what I've shared, I've never really understood what I wanted to be.

I've kind of moved situationally into opportunities.

Many of them afforded me a lot of wonderful things like being overseas or working on Wall Street, living in New York City.

But I think ultimately what I found about that particular world, it was not one that activated me or excited me.

There's, it's a very important part of our world to have folks doing this work, but it just didn't speak to me.

And unusually at my age, close to 40, at just around 40 years old, I pushed all my chips into the middle of the table and left.

And I went to seek what would be a new and different calling or life for me.

And that life ended up being in the nonprofit world, which was a surprise to me in some ways, in that I always been inclined socially to be socially responsible.

One of the stories I share was, one of my formidable moments as a child was as a 10-year-old watching the Watergate hearings with my mother.

Now, this happened over the summer, as you recall, and John Dean and many others, right?

My mother was captivated by this.

I became captivated by this, even at 10 years old.

I don't know that I understood the implications, but as my mother described to me, what she shared with me over and over again was the responsibility.

All of us had to make sure that we were all okay.

That the legislators and people in that environment were trying to do the best they could to deal with the circumstance that was very problematic.

And so I probably always kept that lesson right?

And then I grew up with the thinking that we all have a responsibility to others.

One of my favorite artists in the world is Bruce Springsteen.

And one of his quotes that I heard at a concert many, many years ago, you know, probably is still guided my thinking today.

And that is, if one of us isn't okay, we're not okay.

And so I think that was part of my thinking.

And so when I left the corporate world, I helped a lot of nonprofits by volunteering, offering some services.

One of them said, Hey, will you run this for us?

Right.

Which never occurred to me, right?

And I thought, well, I don't know if I know how to do that.

And he was a forceful of personality.

He said, well, you, you can do this.

And so I started running that nonprofit, built it from little to big , left it went to another nonprofit, built it from little to big.

And so that was kind of what my skillset and gifts were.

But I also fell in love with the idea that there is a way to activate what moves you personally, professionally.

That it was the marriage between the things that I cared about and the form with which I could do those.

- So you went from running Dignity U Wear to the Episcopal Church Foundation in the Jacksonville area.

- Right.

- And then to another church nonprofit where you were the Chief Operating Officer and then to Second Harvest.

- Yeah.

And all of those what the quality of all of those, or the consistency of all of those was they all needed capacity building.

All of them were about, "Hey, we're here and we want to get here."

And as I shared earlier, that's always kind of been the thing I felt good about with saying, okay, here's where we are today.

Here are the assets, resources that we have, we want to get here.

What's the pathway we build and what's the human pathway we need to gather to do that?

What are the facilities and resources that we need to do that?

And what does the future look like?

Where is it we want to head?

I was always fascinated by that journey, even in the corporate world.

That's what I did when I was in Russia.

Right?

So it allowed me to, again, I think use skills that I was interested in.

So all of those organizations, we say in our world, leave it better than you found it.

I think all of those, they were better.

You know, I left it better than I found it and moved them to a place where their capacity and capability was much greater.

- You came to feeding Tampa Bay in 2012.

This was during the Great Recession.

- Yes.

- And the greater Tampa Bay area was one of the hardest hit areas, yeah.

Of the nation.

What challenges, what opportunities did you see when you came at that time?

- The good news is, again, I am ever hopeful in this work.

One of the reasons why I came to this particular opportunity was I felt like it was an unpolished gem.

I thought the value proposition of the organization was really important.

You can't argue that lifting people through food security is not an important issue, and there's universal support for that.

I felt like the organization had some terrific assets to it, but they really just needed to be lifted.

They were certainly in a position where they were in dire straits, which at attract, you know, it's attractive to me.

I would never want to be the guy that follows the hero, not my personality.

I would far rather be the guy that goes in and says, okay, this is a fixer upper, and feeding Tampa Bay had some of those qualities, which I was really interested, and it allowed me to start to say, okay, what is it we need to do to build this?

What's the value here?

How do we start to create a long-term plan for this organization that ultimately starts to lift the community?

Because in as much as we talk about feeding Tampa Bay we appreciate that opportunity, we exist solely for the benefit of the community we serve.

And so the question became, what does our community need?

You go all the way back to the design of the building.

You asked about earlier that design is reflective of conversations with our community.

It's not reflective of our brain power or how smart we are, how good we are.

It's reflective of our ability to speak to friends, neighbors, partners, to say, what do we all need?

And so that was really the thing we started to work at, was to say, what does our community need?

And how can we step much further into that and create greater value and opportunity?

- If you were to look over the last 10 years, what initiatives have you instituted at Feeding Tampa Bay that that really have moved the organization forward?

- I would say there's probably a couple of different things that we've done that probably have helped position us.

One is we have a significant spirit of innovation and a willingness to move into spaces that are unusual or unique.

A few examples, we are one of the first, if not the first, to have an onsite grocery store in our current pantry.

We built a medical services center in our current facility for medical services.

We have three or four mobile grocery stores.

We innovated and pioneered food pantries and universities and schools.

We're now innovating and moving food pantries into medical clinics and creating food as medicine applications.

So one is, I would say we have been completely willing to, or able to say, let's push the normal boundary aside and say, how do we go further and deeper?

Those weren't about innovating.

They were about answering questions or concerns or issues that needed answering our response to, it just happened to be different.

I think I feel good about that, and I think that's part of our DNA is that we would say internally, we don't care what mistakes you make, so long as they're mistakes of aggression.

If you're playing on the balls of your feet, we're fine.

Right?

But get out there, try, learn, fail.

The other thing that I feel really has been an important part of our DNA is we have stepped into every crisis with a significant degree of faith.

So whether it's a hurricane or a pandemic, our organization has stood up and stood in and said, we will be there.

I recall recently having a conversation with someone about the probably three or four days after the pandemic hit.

And we have colleagues at that point.

We probably have 85 or 90 colleagues in in our work, and we call them all into a room and we say, we know you're scared.

We know we don't know what's happening.

We know we don't have a lot of answers, but I'll promise you this.

If you go into this with you, we'll take care of you all the way through it.

We'll make sure everyone has a paycheck.

Everyone has benefits.

Everyone's looked after.

Everyone's medically safe, but our community needs us.

We didn't have a person walk outta that room.

Everybody stand stood up and and stepped in.

And I think that's probably the greatest part of the pride that I have, is our willingness and ability to go into those spaces.

We didn't know if we'd have enough money.

We didn't know the full nature of the illness.

We didn't know the full size of the responsibilities ahead of us.

What we possessed was a courage and a willingness.

And I would say this, I'm sitting in this chair today because other human beings came alongside me when I was at my most difficult or worse or most challenged and provided me grace and thoughtfulness and support when I needed it most.

What drives me in the work that I do today is the sense of responsibility I have to them.

I wouldn't be here where it not for them.

I think our team shares that same belief and responsibility.

- Well, Thomas, I'd like to thank you so much for being our guest today.

- Thanks for having me on, Jeff.

- If you'd like to see this program again, or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us, this Suncoast Business Forum.

(upbeat music)