Page 14 - BusinessWest January 22, 2024

TOP ENTREPRENEUR 2023 >>
A Hunger to Do More
The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts Dramatically Grows Its Operations
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
It’s long been a tenet among nonprofits — success- ful ones, anyway — that they need to think entre- preneurally in order to thrive and grow. To think, in other words, like
successful for-profit businesses do, in terms of resource allocation, finan- cial planning, workforce management, and day-to- day operations.
“We have to
be innovative. We have to be able to adapt to circumstances.”
And no nonprofit has
been more entrepreneur-
ial — and more ambitious
— over the past few years
than the Food Bank of
Western Massachusetts,
whose $30 million project to build a new, larger headquarters in Chicopee culminated not only in last month’s grand-opening ceremony, but in the dramatic expansion of its capacity to perform work it was already doing on a massive scale.
The project — and the accompanying campaign
to raise about $15 million of that cost from donors
— started just before the pandemic and continued through those challenging years, making the success- ful conclusion especially gratifying to Executive Direc- tor Andrew Morehouse and his team, and earning thew Food Bank recognition from BusinessWest as its Top Entrepreneur for 2023.
Executive Director Andrew Morehouse
14 JANUARY 22, 2024 << TOP ENTREPRENEUR 2023 >> BusinessWest