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Private social service agencies—the kind that are fueled by donor dollars, government grants and volunteer labor—often share a dirty little secret that the broader public rarely learns about: they get captured by the people who run them. Paid (usually poorly) or unpaid, those who give their time, labor and waking thoughts to running an organization that exists to help others often start identifying more with the organization than with the public it serves, then eventually view the organization as an extension of themselves.
When that happens, be it at a local volunteer fire department, food pantry or shelter, people can become possessive and territorial. Questions about an organization’s operations or bookkeeping are interpreted as challenges of personal integrity. “Doing good” outweighs “doing right,” leading to rationalizing of all kinds of questionable behavior.
Bad things follow.
Certainly we’ve seen examples of this dynamic locally. The erstwhile local United Way is the poster child for charitable organizations going astray, permanently closing its doors a couple of years ago because of misfeasance. The SAW Habitat for Humanity came close to meeting the same fate and is still not making a clean breast of things, refusing to account for 12 months of revenues and expenses over the past few years. Now it appears the Verona Community Food Pantry may be joining those ranks—and it couldn’t be at a worse time.
THANKS TO A LETHAL combination of steadily rising prices and the Trump administration’s war on social benefits of all kinds, one of the agriculturally most productive countries in the world is being ravaged by growing food insecurity. That means food pantries and the food banks that support them have seldom been as critically important to community welfare.
Just how bad are things getting? According to the recently released results of a statewide survey commissioned by the Federation of Virginia Food Banks and the Virginia Department of Social Services, more than half (51%) of Virginia families with children are food insecure. That compares with the 42% of Virginians who reported they were food insecure in last year’s U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) annual hunger survey, a figure so stark that the USDA thereafter ended decades of data collection on the subject.
(The USDA announced the survey’s termination last September by explaining that “these redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger.” Past studies were “initially created by the Clinton administration as a means to support the increase of SNAP [food stamps] eligibility and benefit allotments,” but “failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.” Who knew that facts leaned left, or that collecting them would result in fear mongering?)
Ironically, “food insecurity” used to be an official USDA term. It refers to people who don’t have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from, and has grown in tandem with cuts in social benefits. More than 100,000 Virginians have lost their SNAP benefits over the past year, and more losses are expected in the year ahead, making food pantries an increasingly critical lifeline for growing numbers of local residents.
Food pantries, which in our region coordinate their efforts through the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, freely redistribute food donated by supermarkets, bakeries, local farmers and other sources, including hunters who contribute game. They also distribute surplus USDA food (think cheese, but also much more), whose recipients must qualify under federal poverty income guidelines. But while the food itself is free, gathering, storing and distributing it is not. There are expenses. How much and how that’s paid is where things can get dicey.
The Verona Community Food Pantry, which has been operating rent-free out of an Augusta County-owned building in Verona since 2006, presents itself as a low-overhead example of a lean operation. Boasting that it has an all-volunteer operation with no payroll and no paid outside contractors, it rolls along year after year on not much more than $50,000 in annual expenses for such basics as insurance, postage, and truck gas and repairs. On that threadbare budget it manages to distribute more than a million pounds of food each year, supplying hundreds of local residents with groceries it calculates are worth an estimated $250 to $300 per visit. Again, keep in mind: most of that food has been donated.
In addition to food, and like all other pantries, the Verona pantry also pulls in cash gifts and donations to fund its operations, and raises additional money through yard sales, concerts and other fund-raisers. And while a chunk of that money goes to the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank (BRAFB) to purchase sharply discounted food, such as meat, that is less available from the usual sources, such spending is only a fraction of the cash that the pantry brings in each year.
Specifically, as reported in the pantry’s federal 990 tax filings, those cash contributions amounted to $858,092 in 2024, $493,576 in 2023, $520,140 in 2022 and $501,041 in 2021. That adds up a four-year total of $2.4 million, following a huge surge of post-pandemic support for all kinds of charitable organizations. Of that $2.4 million, $417,624 went to food bank purchases and another $161,293 for those lean operating expenses.
The other $1.8 million? Good question.
Some of it—a hefty amount, actually—has been squirreled away, although to what purpose is unclear. Excess revenue in the pantry’s early years was used for much needed capital improvements, including freezers, a truck, a forklift and bathrooms at the warehouse, but such spending has become infrequent this decade. The cash instead has been piling up, reaching $758,146 at the end of 2024—enough to generate nearly $29,000 in investment income in just that one year. Putting aside the question of why the pantry needs cash reserves of 15 times its annual operating expenses, that still leaves more than a million dollars unaccounted for. Where did it go?
The pantry’s managers, alas, are not saying.
NON-PROFIT 501(c)3s like the Verona Community Food Pantry can be notoriously opaque—until red flags start popping up. Maybe especially when red flags pop up.
One such flag may get waved by governing board members jumping ship, which may be nothing more than a consequence of otherwise benign organizational changes or of multiple personal reasons coinciding. But several near-simultaneous resignations also may signal something more troubling—and few things are more troubling to board members than financial impropriety, forcing them to balance their fiduciary duties against a desire not to harm the reputation of an organization whose mission they’ve embraced. One way out of that dilemma is to just walk away.
It’s noteworthy, therefore, that some unknown number of the Verona pantry’s board members reportedly have let it be known they’re resigning, although how many and for what reasons has not been made public.
A second red flag may appear when information about an organization dries up. For example, the most recent post on the pantry’s Facebook page, which previously had been updated on a regular basis, was in March. Its federal 990 tax form for 2025, which had a filing deadline in May, is nowhere to be seen, which means the pantry’s most recent publicly available financial information is more than 20 months old. (Although this isn’t the first time the pantry missed a filing: it apparently also didn’t file for 2015.) And the pantry is on thin ice with the State Corporation Commission, where its corporate status is “pending inactive” because “annual registration fee past due and/or penalties unpaid and annual report past due—not in good standing.”
It’s possible these are mere paperwork oversights because the pantry has a new board president, but its executive director, Ike Moore, has been at the helm since 2017.
But a third and most damning red flag is run up the pole when an organization stonewalls reasonable inquiries. Asked about people quitting the board, former president Cecil Wright—the last board president to have his name appear on a form 990—confirmed that resignations are expected but that as of last week no letters of resignation had been received. Who those members might be or why they are quitting, he would not say. Nor would he provide any contact information for anyone in the pantry’s leadership. Meanwhile, several attempts over the past week to get answers to a detailed set of emailed questions, sent to Moore and to the new board president, Chris Terrell, went unanswered, despite a phoned assurance from Terrell that he would do so.
That’s altogether too many red flags, and all the more so in the context of financials that don’t add up.
The Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, although it’s an entirely separate organization, has some oversight of its constituent pantries. But Robin Swecker, BRAFB’s “partner engagement manager,” downplays any problems at the Verona pantry, describing them as merely a “bump in the road” that “has been resolved for now.” The nature of that bump? “It was mostly growing pains” she wrote in an email, of an organization that has been around for 20 years.
Follow-up questions about that assessment also went unanswered.
