photo by: Contributed

Brett Hartford

Though he was born and raised in Lawrence, the new leader of local food bank Just Food hasn’t lived here in nearly two decades.

One might assume that means much has changed in the eyes of Brett Hartford, Just Food’s newest executive director. But for Hartford, who left Lawrence to attend college and has since lived on the East Coast, the return has felt more like a homecoming than anything.

“What I remembered of Lawrence was home and the inclusive community,” Hartford told the Journal-World last week, a week into his new role with Just Food. “I had forgotten that, but I don’t think it’s changed as much as everyone feels like it could have changed. They see that there’s more people here and the edges of town are farther away than they used to be, but I remember community and I returned to a feeling of community. That’s what I think is really beautiful and what made us want to be back here.”

Hartford moved back to Lawrence from New Jersey, where he and his family — his wife of 14 years and their two daughters — lived as Hartford served in various roles for a number of nonprofits, including 10 years with New York City nonprofit City Relief. Hartford said he and his wife are actually both from Lawrence, so the return has been a homecoming for them both. All of their extended family has stayed in Lawrence over the years, an added bonus.

It’s pretty different from the community the family called home in New Jersey, Hartford said, which was about an hour and 20 minutes’ drive from New York City. There, the town they lived in had roughly 2,000 people in it, part of a metro area of similarly sized small communities. But he said while driving from one town to the next it seemed as if everything ran together, and it was hard to tell when one town ended and another began.

That stands in stark contrast to a city like Lawrence, which Hartford said truly has the feeling of an all-encompassing community.

“I think that Lawrence is amazing,” Hartford said. “I think what makes Lawrence amazing is the diversity of the population, and I think in order to have the diversity of population that makes Lawrence as amazing as it is, we have to remember that as Lawrence grows and the real estate grows and all that stuff, that not everybody is growing at the same speed.”

That was part of the draw for Hartford — the desire to remind those who have more to lift everybody else up with them and ensure everyone can live in this community equitably.

Ending up back in Lawrence wasn’t the original plan, Hartford said, but the role with Just Food was “the perfect job.”

“I’ve done everything in the nonprofit world except for this ‘top leader’ position, and I’ve been interested in finding something like that,” Hartford said. “But it needed to be serving a population that mattered.”

Starting out, Hartford said he’s putting himself on a “listening tour” for the next six months, with the goal of interacting directly with as many community partners and food bank patrons as possible. That’ll involve a lot of asking questions and listening, he said, but early on it has also included things like helping patrons with check-in during Just Food’s open hours so he could hear from them firsthand about meeting their needs.

In short, Hartford said he needs to know the community in order to serve the community.

And once his six-month listening tour has drawn to a close, Hartford said one of the first steps will be ensuring that folks know Just Food is a stable organization that will be here for decades to come.

“I don’t think there’s doubt, but I think that gets ‘wobbly’ when there is leadership transition like there has been,” Hartford said. “… Stabilization is number one for staff, for everybody.”

There have been plenty of those leadership transitions for Just Food in the past six months or so. Hartford is the third individual to hold the executive director role — whether permanent or in an interim capacity — this year. The nonprofit’s last permanent director, Elizabeth Keever, left Just Food for a role as Heartland Community Health Center’s chief development officer in May after more than five years at the helm. Keever was replaced by an interim director, Brett Salsbury, but he served in that position for less than five months.

Then there’s the added pressure for Just Food this year in terms of the number of patrons it’s serving. In August, the food bank set a record for patrons served in one day for the third time this year, and Hartford said last week he expected the daily record could be broken once more before the end of 2022.

Hartford said nonprofits often try to lean on their strengths rather than voicing their needs and weaknesses, and he wants to avoid that. Right now, for example, the most immediate need for Just Food is stocking its shelves. Hartford said it’s often more cost-effective for people to donate a few items they’ve found on sale during a trip to the grocery store than it is for the nonprofit to purchase food items in bulk and operate around the parameters it’s held to in spending its grant dollars.

“I have no problem with people asking questions,” Hartford said. “I want to be as honest and vulnerable as possible with the needs that we have, because they are great. If we are protective of them or scared to share or whatnot, then we’re going to have people who are not going to be served as well.”

It’ll come down to earning the community’s trust, Hartford said, so he can bring some stability and “re-energize” the work the nonprofit’s already been doing for years.

Hartford said he’s continuing to learn about the landscape of food insecurity in Douglas County, another priority area for him as he gets acclimated to the new role. He said he’s hopeful that other community members will be interested in learning more about topics like food waste, too.

Hartford said the agency will plan on making good use of its social media channels to that end.

“This community, I know if you give them the chance to be supportive and to try new things and learn new things and use that knowledge in order to make other people’s lives better, then everyone is going to be for learning new things,” Hartford said.