Collaboration, Not Competition: Working Together to Address Food Insecurity

I get asked pretty regularly whether The Store is in competition with the other hunger relief organizations in town.

Competition for what?

There is far too much food insecurity in Middle Tennessee for any one organization, or two, or five, to address alone. We aren’t competing for the work. There is more than enough work to be done.

What interests me much more is what happens when organizations stop thinking only about their individual piece of the problem and start asking what we can do together. Five organizations working collectively, each bringing what they know and what they do well, can have a very different kind of impact than five working in silos.

Last week, I got a small glimpse of that.

Troy Edwards, COO of Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, spent an hour at The Store with Tracey Johnson Alderdice, their VP of Community Impact, and Dillard Adams, who is helping design the market space in their new distribution center. They’re building a choice-based grocery space there, so they came to see ours.

I brought Raquel Summers, our new COO, who is already better at this than I am, and then we talked shop.

Refrigeration brands. Produce coolers. What has held up and what we’d skip. What we’d buy again. Ideal pallet heights. We talked about watermelons a lot longer than I expected to talk about watermelons.

They asked what we’ve learned from running a choice-based grocery store. We asked about supply chain, some growing pains we’re experiencing, and what they’ve learned operating at a scale much larger than ours.

Nobody had all the answers, and everybody had something to share.

They offered food safety training for some of our newest staff and a connection to their nutritionist. Troy invited us to come see their operation and keep learning from them.

I left encouraged and inspired, which is not always how I leave a meeting about coolers and pallet stacking.

There is so much work to be done, and there are good organizations all over this community doing different parts of it well. The opportunity isn’t to prove who can solve it best. It’s to learn from one another, share what works, be honest about what doesn’t, and figure out how our different strengths can add up to something bigger than any of us could accomplish alone.

That feels a lot more useful than competition.

Thank you, Troy, Tracey, and Dillard, for being so generous with what you know. Come back anytime. We’ll save you a watermelon.