By Thea Jarvis

Braves' third baseman Terry Pendleton scores hits for it. Metro Atlantans walk for it. Upscale eateries and caterers feed it. Volunteers of all ages and backgrounds lend it their time and energy.

What organization sparks such broad-based support for its effective management and creative vision, winning applause for its efforts to contain local and global hunger?

Atlanta's own Community Food Bank, which marked Pendleton's $20 a hit pledge with an appreciation award delivered at Braves stadium earlier this summer.

Founded 13 years ago as an offshoot of St. Luke's Episcopal Church street ministries program, the Atlanta Community Food Bank (ACFB) has grown from a fledgling provider of staples for 25 member organizations to a primary food source for nearly 600 non-profits throughout the state of Georgia and beyond.

Presently, ACFB distributes an average of one million pounds of food each month, a figure representing an annual growth of 15 percent for each of the past five years.

With special projects like "Let's Bag Hunger," Atlanta's Table, and the annual Hunger Walk, it raises consciousness and increases participation among people whose lives aren't normally touched by hunger.

"I had no idea it would grow" to the degree it has, said ACFB founder Bill Bolling, who feels building a ready supply of food for the hungry was a matter of "really seizing an opportunity. The food was available and the need was growing."

Bolling came to St. Luke's in 1975 to take charge of the church's street ministries to the homeless. At a time when the only game in town was the Salvation Army and the Union Mission, St. Luke's was an innovator in providing church-based food and shelter.

By 1978, Bolling said, St. Luke's was feeding some 300 people a day. As he drove his truck around the city collecting food for the weekday soup kitchen, "I saw more food out there than I could use and knew other people could use it."

He started the Food Bank in 1979 with the excess he discovered and left St. Luke's street ministries to become full-time director of the Food Bank in 1981.

The timing proved fortuitous, since, as the '80s progressed, "a major shift began away from the public sector to the private sector" and it was principally the religious community that sustained efforts like ACFB, he said.

Though support has grown beyond the parameters of the institutional church, "without the participation of the community and without volunteers, we could not run the Food Bank," Bolling believes.

Located in the old Atlanta Beverage Company warehouse and office facility on Jefferson Street, acquired seven years ago when ACFB outgrew space at St. Luke's, the Food Bank uses 60,000 square feet of warehouse space and rents 20,000 more off-site. Even so, Bolling admits, additional space is needed.

"We're out of room" he said, placing their requirements at closer to 200,000 square feet. A facilities committee from ACFB's advisory board is researching a possible move.

"We need to affirm our mission and redefine who we want to be in the next 10 years," he said, adding that the services ACFB offers have become broader, more complex.

The Food Bank now operates six trucks that pick up donated food from local wholesalers, brokers and distributors. Additional carriers are contracted to procure donations from outlying areas.

Food is brought back and stored at the Food Bank, but one pallet of each item available is held out and displayed on a "shopping floor" where agencies like St. Vincent de Paul, the Atlanta Bettered Women's Shelter, Project Open Hand, Cafe 458 and Open Door shop much like the average supermarket consumer.

At a checkout area, food is weighed and a fee of $0.12 per pound is assessed to help cover operating costs.

Initially, ACFB only captured food and dispersed it to member organizations. "We were the go-between," Bolling explained.

Over the years, the relationship with donors has become more sophisticated. ACFB now deals with damaged and salvaged goods, taking in a distribution food both in and out of state. It also does more training and technical assisting of member groups, employing three full-time people who organize and monitor participating agencies.

Administratively, ACFB gets high marks for efficient, cost-effective management. This year it was recognized as a food bank of excellence by the Second Harvest National Network of Food Banks. In 1984, the Metropolitan Atlanta Community Foundation cited ACFB as the best managed midsized non-profit in the 19-county metro area and gave it a sustained good management award in 1989.

While the Food Bank is delivering more and better services to agencies that serve expanding populations of poor, homeless, unemployed, marginalized, it does so without putting its own staff at fiscal risk.

"You can't do (this work) just on good will," Bolling said. With a budget of $2 million, "you've got to be professional, accountable, manage well."

Thirty-five full-time ACFB professionals are paid a "living wage," he said. "This can be a career for somebody."

While employees in the second floor offices on Jefferson Street go about their work, they are backed by one of the largest volunteer pools around.

Atlanta's Table, which solicits excess prepared food and delivers it daily to local Atlanta agencies that feed the needy, is a practical example of how people pull together to solve problems of hunger and food waste.

Through this ACFB project, over 200 metro restaurants, caterers, cafeterias, corporate dining rooms, hotels, convention centers, hospitals and vending companies combine to donate a total of 30,000 pounds of food each month.

At Atlanta's Dogwood Festival, an annual event held in the spring, ACFB volunteers have manned concession stands for the past two years, donating their wages to Food Bank coffers.

During the ACFB-sponsored Metro Atlanta Hunger Walk, begun in 1984, volunteers log kilometers for pledged donations. Seventy-five percent of the money goes to hunger relief organizations, 25 percent covers ACFB costs to run the event.

"The Hunger walk is our educational arm," said Bolling, explaining that it gives ACFB an opportunity to introduce the issue of hunger to schools, churches, businesses, "talking about how people can get involved."

"That's our foot in the door," he said, especially with young people, who are naturally drawn to the walk.

"We owe it to the kids to say there are options, ways to make a difference," Bolling feels.

"When problems appear to be so big, it often makes us feel small. But it's the small gifts added up" that make the difference, he said.

Bolling, who grew up in Winston-Salem, NC, has been making a difference since he arrived in Atlanta. Recent trips to the former Soviet Union to establish a food bank in St. Petersburg have given his work a more global dimension.

"It's working," he said, anticipating his fourth trip back to what he sees as a group of "emerging democracies."

"I'm using the food bank to teach the arts of democracy" because, he believes, "food is one of the best organizing tools there is," a commodity everyone deserves to have and which, if distributed properly, is available to all.

To Bolling, "food banks are just part of the answer" in a capitalist marketing system. "(Capitalism) is great, but there's a lot of waste with that system."

People should not be limited by the food bank model, he said, since, "in the long run, we want to help people help themselves." Food banks can work with food cooperatives, community gardens, farmers' markets, becoming "part of an enlarged mission," to fight hunger. It is "not a passing thing, but an intricate part of the system."

"We've always had waste," Bolling points out. "That's even biblical. There will always be waste, always be people in need."

The question then becomes, "How do we use this knowledge to explore, work, engage the larger community?"

"There is hope" in the battle against waste and hunger, he concluded. "There is a way to respond."