A LinkedIn post prompted Teri Broderick to become a FFEN volunteer. Having spent her career as a program manager and product leader in the education and healthcare fields she said she was excited to find an organization where she could continue to help people.
“I was born for this job,” she said.
Most recently Broderick has been using her skills in a different way. She was asked to be the project manager of FFEN’s volunteer team tasked with taking a deeper dive into data from the 2022 Minnesota Food Shelf Managers Survey. The 2022 survey of 260 food shelf managers highlights the opportunities and challenges facing Minnesota’s food shelves. On a broad scale, the results inform hunger relief advocacy as well as decision making at the state level.
Those results informed the creation of the 2025 survey, for which data collection was just completed, and, the data drives FFEN’s work with food shelves, providing insight into how FFEN can respond to the needs of food shelf managers.
“It has been highly enjoyable,” Broderick said.
It has also given Broderick a deeper picture of what’s happening in food shelves across the state and that picture, she said, is paramount to understanding strategic areas for improvement.
“I don’t worry about my next meal, maybe I complain about prices or notice prices, but I don’t really change my behavior at the store,” she said. “That’s not the reality for a lot of people…I want to smooth out the bumps in the system that serves people.”
