SAFSF Membership Manager Holly Hanes sat down with longtime SAFSF member and recently retired Vice President, Sustainability, of The Heinz Endowments, Andrew McElwaine, to reflect on his career in food systems and decades of membership with SAFSF.
Andrew McElwaine recently left The Heinz Endowments, where he was responsible for building the foundation’s sustainability-related work, including infusing the principles of environmental and social sustainability across the full range of the organization’s grantmaking. Andrew was previously the Endowments’ first Director of Environmental Programs, returning to the Endowments in 2015 after being president and CEO of Pennsylvania Environmental Council and holding similar positions with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and the American Farmland Trust. Now, Andrew is semi-retired and serves as the Director of Strategy and Operations for Three Rivers Alliance of Community Health Centers.
The Heinz Endowments’ Food System work is built on the tenet that all people deserve access to fresh, healthy food, while its Climate, Environment & Health strategy works to improve environmental quality in four areas: air quality; the transition away from an extractive, carbon-polluting economy to a climate-friendly region; healthy environments for children; and water quality and safety. The Heinz Endowments is a private foundation based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has been a member of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders for 11 years.
During his time in philanthropy, Andrew served on the SAFSF Board of Directors, the 2019 Pittsburgh Forum planning committee, and as co-chair of the Executive Director Search Committee.
The following interview has been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Tell Us Your SAFSF Story
I got involved on the margins of SAFSF when I was president of the American Farmland Trust from 2013 to 2015. At that time, I was in touch with former SAFSF Executive Director Virginia Clarke, sharing ideas, thoughts, and practice issues. After I went back to The Heinz Endowments in 2015 as the Vice President of Sustainability, I attended the 2016 SAFSF Forum, and we started our food systems grantmaking the following year, joining SAFSF at that time.
Why did The Heinz Endowment join SAFSF?
We joined because it’s a community of practice that covers the broad range of issues in food systems, which is broad. It was also an exciting time in the field, because it was growing and more funders were getting involved. There was impact investing going on and people looking for ways in which to achieve greater sustainability and justice in the food system, so it was a fun time to get involved with SAFSF! The field has matured a lot since then, and SAFSF has as well. It was fun to watch that happen as a member and on the SAFSF Board of Directors.
What was it like being on the SAFSF Board of Directors?
I joined the Board as COVID-19 was starting to wane, and the only executive director SAFSF ever had was departing, ushering in a period of transition for the organization. SAFSF had been under New Ventures as a fiscally supported organization, and I got on the board right after that ended, so I didn’t participate in drafting the bylaws and the articles and getting the 501c3…all of that had now been done, which was some heavy lifting, and kudos to the board that did that! The organization also transitioned in terms of the board taking on more responsibility and sharing leadership with staff. Suddenly, being a governing board, we had to find our feet, find a balance, and then we had to find a new executive director.
Search Committee
I was Co-Chair of the search committee, and my leadership role there was to find the next executive director. We took it pretty seriously and did a lot of interviews. I’m very pleased that Clare said yes, and very proud to have been on her search committee. The leadership she had in Los Angeles, her balancing of policy and innovation in the field, and her ability as a convener are all attributes I still remember clearly. Those three things stood out for me about her and made me very excited about her candidacy. We made the right choice!
I did not stay on the Board of Directors for a second term because my time at Heinz would have ended before the term was up. I didn’t think that was fair to the board to have to fill a seat that’s, you know, two-thirds of the way through.
Tell us about your involvement with SAFSF
I was on the SAFSF Forum Host Committee in 2018 when you all came to Pittsburgh, and it was great. I did a walking tour of urban agriculture as part of the field trips and really enjoyed that very much… with a number of my grantees and colleagues out in the field, quite literally in the field! It was a thrill to host the Forum back in the day—what’s now, 8 years? Good Lord, 8 years ago! That was fun, and I enjoyed that. If you get a chance to be on a Forum Host Committee, I strongly recommend it – it’s a very positive experience.
What about the Forum made it a stand-out experience for you?
I would always attend the SAFSF Forums, and the Forums are very, very valuable. Even if the topic isn’t directly associated with your grantmaking, the ability to learn from others and get a wider sense of the field and the issues other foundations and donors are struggling with…it’s just always valuable. My advice to new members: attend the Forums. If there is a working group that appeals to your grantmaking, get involved. Those are very, very valuable.
Making the most of SAFSF is, particularly for smaller to mid-size foundations, a good value for the dollars–you put into it what you get back. I found SAFSF to be a very welcoming organization by and large; I really never felt out of place anywhere within the organization, either at board meetings or at events.
Do you have a stand-out learning or a session from any of the SAFSF Forums you attended?
I was very involved with urban food systems, and there was a lot of work done on financing and impact investing in that field that was helpful to me as I tried to look. Where I live, working for a regional philanthropy, there were only a few other funders in the region who were committed to food systems, so leveraging some of the work SAFSF member Potlikker Capital, for example, is doing was really amazing stuff. Learning from the investment side ways of supporting a just food system was very helpful to me as I tried to think of alternative ways to finance important work in our community.
How has your involvement in SAFSF been of value as a foundation member?
Oh my goodness. A lot of ways! One was just the knowledge gained from the SAFSF Forums and from the different calls and webinars. They made me a better and more empathetic grantmaker. That was probably the most valuable: the insights gained from having a community of practice that specializes in the food system. So that’s number one for me!
Number two: opportunities. I did not have as many opportunities to partner with other members because of my regional limitations and focus, but opportunities to consider other modes of grantmaking that colleagues were pursuing was very valuable to me.
Another was getting connected on the food waste side. We did some food waste grantmaking, and that community of practice really grew quickly under SAFSF, and I’m very grateful for that.
Thinking about your time collectively at the Heinz Endowment, what is something that you are most proud of?
Oh, boy! [There are a] bunch of things I’m really pleased with, and it’s going to be hard to pick just one.
I’m really delighted with the growth of Food Rescue Hero. Its first partner was here in Pittsburgh (412 Food Rescue); they’re now in more than a dozen other cities performing food rescue work. I’m very glad I had enough common sense left to say, “yeah, this looks like a good grant”.
Another one I’m really pleased with is Farm to Table Western PA that’s pretty vigorous and active. We also built up the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council with our grantmaking and managed to persuade some other grantmakers to come in and support it. The Pittsburgh Food Policy Council was very successful in creating a Greater Pittsburgh Food Action Plan, which they followed and got extensive community buy-in. They really went over the top in terms of having community sessions and getting input and feedback on that plan. They were also successful at working with the city to create a Food Justice Fund (with the city allocating over $3 Million!) to support a number of Heinz’ grantees and folks I would have liked to have had as my grantees if I’d had more budget.
The Heinz Endowments helped a group called Black Urban Gardeners and Farmers of Pittsburgh Co-Op (BUGS) that I’m really proud of. They had to hire an architectural engineering firm to develop a plan that they could submit to the city to get a hold of some vacant lots, and we [Heinz] decided to pay for that. When they got it up and running as a farm, we kept supporting them. Really happy that they’re there! They’re creating a co-op in a community that’s been a food desert since the 1990s.
Thinking about the evolution of food systems funding, what are some trends that you are excited to see coming forward or that came up towards the end of your time at The Heinz Endowments that you’re looking forward to seeing progress?
Oof! I think one of the things I’m happiest about is that there are 130 members in SAFSF. There were about 98 when I was on the board – a 30% increase here in 2-3 years; that’s a nice number, I like it! The growth of the movement is the thing that I’m most happy and impressed with.
In terms of where I’m going to stay involved in the food system, it’s going to be more on the fallout. I was part of the SNAP Working Group; I really appreciated SAFSF taking the lead in getting those set up with Grantmakers in Health. These SNAP cuts could upend so much of what I’ve tried to do in this region and go back to where we were at the peak of COVID-19, where people were sitting in their cars, 6-mile-long lines to get a box of food thrown in their trunk. That worries me the most, and it just undermines a big chunk of the work that was trying to get people out of the lines at food pantries and into more personally sustainable situations in food and nutrition. That’s all being undermined by the government right now.
I am also really pleased with the phenomenal growth of the food waste and food rescue movement in the country.
In SAFSF, we are seeing growth in interest from funders who do not identify as “food system funders” or even “food funders”, but are health funders, climate funders, rural, economic development—all the areas that obviously affect the food system, or are affected by the food system. The Heinz Endowments is a member of SAFSF and Grantmakers in Health; what would you say to other health-oriented funders who don’t see themselves as food funders but could benefit from playing in a space like SAFSF?
I founded and co-chaired the Food as Health Care Coalition of Pennsylvania, and that was another one of my grantees late in my career. I didn’t want to call it “Food as Medicine,” because that implied you were already sick and needed medicine. So we’ll finally give you some healthy food now that you’re sick… I didn’t want that. I wanted food as healthcare; the idea being that food prevents health crises.
That’s not to say that food banks should be part of the healthcare system, but nutrition is a social driver of health, probably the most easily influenced social driver of health, that we are spending a fortune on through treatments of diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, etc. We could be investing those dollars in the food system and not have people sick in the first place. That work is very meaningful to me, and it’s something if I was in a grantmaking role, I would want to continue to invest in that overlap between nutrition and health. You know, we almost got a Food as Medicine and Medicaid provision passed in the legislature in 2026, but didn’t quite make it over the finish line. They’re going to try again in 2027, and I’ll continue to volunteer to make it happen.
In closing, what advice would you offer to members who are engaging with SAFSF but have not thought about jumping into leadership yet?
I would encourage them to jump right in. As I say, I always found it very welcoming. The SAFSF Board meetings were really interesting and held in some cool places, although getting out of Los Angeles one night during one of those rivers of water coming over the city was a challenge.
I found the board meetings informative, and I really enjoyed my fellow board members, [and] made some lifelong friends. Seek out a board seat, even if you can only serve one term as I did, cause you’re late in your career. I got a lot out of it, and hopefully SAFSF got as much out of it as I got.