Look for the Helpers 11: Food & Community

This episode of Design and Religion continues the “Look for the Helpers” series with Cathy Kanefsky, President and CEO of the Food Bank of Delaware. The conversation opens with the larger theme of help itself: what it means to become a helper, how people are shaped by hardship, and why some leaders are drawn into work they never originally planned to do.

Cathy shares her own path into nonprofit leadership through deeply personal experience. She reflects on raising twin sons born extremely premature, later diagnosed with autism, and how that family journey led her into mission-driven work at the March of Dimes, Autism Speaks, Nemours, and eventually the Food Bank of Delaware. She describes this path as something she was led into rather than strategically planned, and that theme gives the episode its emotional center. Her story frames the Food Bank’s work with unusual depth. Hunger is presented as one form of insecurity among many, and Cathy offers a powerful reframing: if you take the word “food” away from “food insecurity,” what remains is the experience of not knowing what tomorrow will bring.

From there, the episode broadens into a strong portrait of what the Food Bank of Delaware actually does. Cathy explains that most people imagine a food bank as a cold warehouse or a simple distribution site. She replaces that image with a fuller picture. The Food Bank still provides immediate food access, yet it also operates workforce and training programs that help people build stability for the future. She describes this structure through the organization’s two-part language: Food for Today and Food for Tomorrow. “Food for Today” includes pantry access, backpack programs, partner agencies, and mobile distributions. “Food for Tomorrow” includes culinary job training, logistics training, and kitchen programs for adults with intellectual disabilities.

The conversation also highlights the Food Bank’s work with adults with intellectual disabilities, including a culinary training pathway designed with a tailored curriculum and employer partnerships. This section becomes even more meaningful when Cathy shares that her own twin sons work at the Food Bank as part of a group of employees with disabilities doing meaningful work with support in place. That personal connection gives this part of the episode a rare honesty. It also reinforces a broader message: many people hold tremendous potential, and what they often need is belief, structure, and a real opportunity.

Another major thread is systems pressure. Cathy explains how federal food support disruptions and changes in donated food patterns have forced the organization to evolve operationally. She describes the loss of expected USDA food shipments, the need to purchase more essential goods directly, and the community response that followed. Rather than centering the organization’s hardship, she centers the families who depend on the Food Bank. This part of the conversation gives the episode real civic weight. Hunger is revealed as a systems issue involving logistics, pu