Nourishing Neighbors: An interview with Christy Duncan-Anderson

Christy Duncan-Anderson, Executive Director, Albertsons Companies Foundation, shares the origins and impact of our Nourishing Neighbors program and how it helps us achieve our mission to inspire well-being. 

Tell us about your journey in hunger relief, the nonprofit sector, and at Safeway and Albertsons Companies.  

I was born with a passion for trying to make things better in this world. I see the world as a great place and suffering as something where I feel a moral imperative to eliminate as much as possible. Before joining Safeway / Albertsons Companies , I was working at a non-profit and was frequently asked to speak at conferences as an expert on marketing for nonprofits. I decided to look for a company to work at for two years to become the very best at marketing. I wanted to take those learnings and go back to the nonprofit sector to implement it for even more good. 

I had traveled all around the world and happened to land back in Pleasanton, CA, where Safeway was headquartered. I was drawn to Safeway – the company and culture. I joined the team in 2006 in Advertising. It was really fun. I have an advertising background; I was in an agency straight out of college. 

In 2011, five years after starting at Safeway, my team had just helped launch the program that would become Just for U, when the position for Executive Director came up for the Safeway Foundation. It took me about two seconds to apply. Remember how I said I would learn all I could about marketing in two years and take that back to the nonprofit sector? My influence would be so much greater here. We have so much potential to do good in our communities. Where else can you raise $40, $50, $60 million a year? Where else can I do that aggregation of one dollar at a time to a total that's so big and be able to influence the whole sector?!

Share more about Nourishing Neighbors - when it started, who it helps, and why it matters. 

When I was at Safeway, our Foundation helped many causes, but not one of them was hunger related. I worked with our data team to survey customers and get insights into what they thought our true focus should be. The pre-survey came back and ‘childhood hunger’ was through the roof. We started there, customers responded, and it was incredibly successful. 

We developed a program called ‘Hunger Is’, with a hunger-focus that was renamed to Nourishing Neighbors in March of 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Vivek Sankaran, CEO, challenged us to figure out how we want to show up for our communities. The COVID-19 pandemic was terrible, but it allowed us to focus on exactly how we wanted to help out when bad things happen. And for individuals, things are bad often, not just during a pandemic. Since then, #NourishingNeighbors continues to impact on hunger-related issues in our communities. 

Our Purpose is to bring people together around the joys of food and to inspire well-being. Share how Nourishing Neighbors accomplishes that. 

I strongly believe that all our neighbors should have the food they need and should have the joy of food. A lot of the work we do is centered around food justice and dignity. The ability to select the food that you put on your family’s table is something that we at Nourishing Neighbors feel should be the right of everyone.

"I strongly believe that all our neighbors should have the food they need and should have the joy of food."

Tell us more about what ‘breaking the cycle of hunger’ means. 

Food banks and pantries are great tried-and-true mechanisms to get food to people who are hungry. But being hungry is a temporary, satiation issue – if we give people food today, no matter how well we do it and how dignified the experience, that person will be back for more food tomorrow or the next day. I don’t want to just feed people today, I want to end the cycle of hunger so that those people have their own agency to go to our stores, purchase the food for their families, and not continuously hand out food to a never-ending line of people in need.  

(Read more about the Hunger Cycle.) 

How are our associates key to the Nourishing Neighbors mission? 

All of our associates are volunteers for Nourishing Neighbors, and it will take all of us working together to end the cycle of hunger for our neighbors. From providing skill-based volunteerism to helping out the Foundation team with our programs, associates are key to the mission. Every single one of us has a role – did you know that when associates are engaged and talking to the customers about the program, our donations at the pinpad can go up as much as 40%? Think about it: if we raise an average of $6 million at the pinpad that we can use to enable over 20 million meals, if we all engage our customers at the pinpad, we could raise our donations up to over $8 million and enable over 30 million meals! 

Share a favorite story or moment about Nourishing Neighbors and inspiring well-being.

I have the joy of visiting a lot of our partner organizations in the field and seeing what they do on the ground to end hunger in our communities. One day, I went to a pantry where they take the food that is donated and recycle some of it into different products. On this particular day, they were taking peaches from the farm that didn’t fit standards, as well as the peaches we donated from our store in our Fresh Rescue program and were making peach salsa. I tell you – that salsa was GOOD! I had some and I still dream about it.  

There was this one volunteer, Jose, who was celebrating his last day volunteering with the program. Some of the other team members brought some chips and other fixings for nachos. As we were eating, I asked Jose why it was his last day. Between mouthfuls of peach salsa, he told me that working there had helped him get a job at a local restaurant. He was volunteering to “give back” for the help that he received. But now, he was moving up to be an assistant chef at a larger restaurant and had bought a condo too far away to volunteer at the pantry anymore.  

Jose’s was a success story of someone who got help at the pantry and then participated in programs that helped him end the cycle of hunger for him and his 3 daughters. I don’t think I will ever taste peaches that sweet again. 

Is there anything else you would like to share?  

Only how proud I am to work for Albertsons Companies . I absolutely feel that I have the best job and am grateful for all the support and true dedication the team here has to making our world better. I’m proud to work alongside such talented and compassionate individuals who inspire me to do more and more every day to help our neighbors end the cycle of hunger. 

Learn more about our Nourishing Neighbors program at https://www.nourishingneighbors.com/.