Lynn Brantley, president and CEO of the Capital Area Food Bank, helped to found the organization nearly 30 years ago, inspired by her faith and by Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of justice and compassion. In that time, the food bank has grown from donating 1 million pounds of food to 25 million pounds of food, nearly a quarter of which is fresh fruits and vegetables. This year, she said, has presented more need than ever in the food bank’s history. Brantley, 67, sat down with The Examiner to discuss her life’s work, and the stories that bring her back each day.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I was raised Lutheran — I went to a Lutheran school and a Lutheran college. I have a deep and abiding faith in God and truth and justice. That’s very important to me — it’s my undergirding. It’s what keeps me going day in and day out, because sometimes this job is pretty lonely, and sometimes you face obstacles that make you wonder how you’re ever going to overcome. But somehow a door opens — again and again that’s happened in the work here, and I know it’s something beyond me. It’s something beyond us.
Did anyone or any event especially influence your faith or your path in life?
I can tell you a story about my grandfather. We used to walk his fields on a warm summer evening and look up at the starry sky and he used to tell my cousins and me that your children are the universe. And that was always so marvelous to me as a child, that I’m a child of the universe. And the interconnection between the minerals in the earth and the stars in the sky, and how they come into your body through the food. That was magical for me as a kid. I mean it sounds kooky — but it was really those interconnections with the realities of life that I think he helped pull us into.
This food bank has been here for almost 30 years, and people are still hungry. What keeps you going, when it seems impossible to satisfy hungry bellies?
When you’re facing overwhelming odds you keep in front of you what the needs are — you keep your eyes on the prize, as the saying goes, and on the people who are in need.
I recently heard a story — WHUR at Howard University did a food and funds drive, and through that we got $50 grocery gift cards that we pass out to some people at our agencies. I was told that a woman received a card and said, “You know what this card represents? This card means that my son can come home for Thanksgiving.” He was in college, and he hadn’t wanted to be an extra mouth to feed, but this meant he could come home.
People say that giving out food is charity, but there’s a Jewish word — tzedakah — that means an act of charity is justice in and of itself… There is a rightness to having food on the table.
What do you tell people who feel they don’t have the time or the capacity to give because of work constraints, or too many other responsibilities in this very busy city?
Well, I think it can be so healing to lose yourself in something. To lose yourself is to find yourself, so if you can begin to give to another person, or begin to give to an organization, you begin to lose yourself, and you begin to find yourself at the same time. There are a lot of people in this city who give — we have more than 12,000 people who volunteer with us, some of them every day — so people know and recognize that. People know that it’s powerful, because it moves you out of self-awareness, and into broader awareness of the whole, and how you fit into that.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that love can love can transcend all problems, if we’re willing to love. At my core, if people could love, and forgive, and move beyond to reach out to one another… Food is a vehicle for that to happen — one vehicle. There are many vehicles, but food is a primary, necessary, everyday need that we all have, so it binds us together in a very unique way.
– Leah Fabel
