Tami Nielsen, the new president and CEO of the Food Bank of Iowa, remembers a classmate who came to school hungry when she was in fifth grade in Des Moines.

He came to school “ravenous” on Monday morning, she said, and the teacher reached into his drawer and gave him food.

“I always had plenty; we were very fortunate, but a lot of my classmates didn’t,” Nielsen said. “As I got older, I recognized that, and certainly in retrospect, I can see that more maybe, than I even realized at the time. I remember as a young kid thinking, ‘That’s just not right.’ … I just felt very deeply about that, so that’s probably what led me here. I still think about that, and it still drives me to this day.”

Nielsen took the helm at the Food Bank of Iowa June 1. Her appointment followed a national search after Michelle Book retired from the role at the end of 2024. 

She is the food bank’s fourth leader since its founding 43 years ago. Nielsen joined Food Bank of Iowa in 2016 as a regional partnership coordinator. Since then, she has served in various roles before becoming chief operating officer in 2023. Before Food Bank of Iowa, Nielsen worked as a retail buyer for 11 years. She began her career as a resident and family counselor at House of Mercy in Des Moines.

We recently caught up with Nielsen to talk about her new role. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

You’re an expert in operations, food sourcing and efficiency.  How did you gain expertise in those areas?

First and foremost, we have a fantastic team of experts that we have built, but food banking largely is on-the-job training, because there aren’t a lot of food banks all over the place. Most of us don’t come from working at a food bank. But I understood inventory management from my former position in retail. I understood building relationships with vendors, asking customers what they want. There were a lot of transferable things and aspects that I brought with me from my former job. Prior to that, I was a family counselor, so relationship-building and trust-building and operating to the best of your ability was always in my DNA. I dug right in when I started here, and I learned a lot on the job, because so many things are specific to food banking. We’re a Feeding America food bank, and they have great resources for us to train and learn and do the best that we can, keeping food safe, getting it out the door, being efficient. There’s about 200 Feeding America food banks, one touching every single county in the United States so there are great principles out there to learn from. 

But as far as our logistics here, we’ve grown so much. When I started here, we had six school pantries, and it was a pilot program. Now we have 167. As I grew in each role that I had and progressed in my knowledge and experience, there was always still something else to learn. And typically, at the food bank there are changes that we have to roll with — USDA changes, policy changes, economic changes, so we’re all learning it at the same time, which is also a benefit. But we have such a great team who will dig in and do their best to learn every new thing we need to learn, and put their best foot forward to make it the best it possibly can to feed as many people as we can.

How does your work as a family counselor serve you in what you’re doing now? 

There are relationships to navigate in every aspect of your life, and work is no different, so finding commonality and creating one team is a huge thing to me as well as having a great work culture where we all care about one another, first as a person, and second as an employee. If you’re doing well individually in your home life and your personal life, you’re bringing your best self to work. We are big believers in supporting one another, and we do that. We’re like a family. We take care of each other. We are happy to see each other after our seasonal closure. It’s just a wonderful, warm and caring team environment, and that’s the kind of people I want to be surrounded by. My parents used to always say, ‘Do good, be good and surround yourself with good people.’ And my mom would say, ‘The first two are up to you, but people can choose to be surrounding you or not. If you do the first two things, they will.’ so that’s something I strive for. It’s something that I instilled in my own children, and I’m surrounded by people who are like that, who I aspire to be like. 

So building the team harkens back to your time as a family counselor and listening to people. 

Sometimes people want to talk or vent, or they want to knock around an idea. I can listen without trying to immediately form a defense or an action item around it. I like to listen to the whole thing and to the whole concern, issue, idea, whatever it may be, before I start formulating what I think should happen, because when you listen fully, I think you often come to a better conclusion or a different conclusion than if you stop listening and start solving a problem, and then also people know that you’re tuned out. 

How concerned are you about SNAP cuts and how it’s going to trickle down and impact the Food Bank of Iowa?

We’re very concerned and really disappointed in the cuts to the SNAP program. It came at a time where food insecurity is already at an all-time high, food prices are at an all time high. Our USDA support has lessened, so we have less USDA food. And then the federal cuts to the SNAP program — it’s one more thing, and it will make such a huge deficit in the number of meals available across the country. There are estimates from Feeding America that anywhere from 6 to 9 billion meals across the country will be lost due to these SNAP cuts. For reference, all Feeding America food banks over the last year provided 6 billion meals. So we’d have to do double, or one and a half times, what we did last year, and it’s just not possible. The charitable food system cannot make up that gap. We cannot fill that. There’s not enough money, there’s not enough capacity, there’s just no possible way we can make up that gap, so people will access the emergency food system for the first time finding themselves food insecure. Or maybe they didn’t have to go to a local pantry when they were using SNAP, but if their SNAP is cut, they have to go to the pantry. We know that our partners are going to need more. We have wonderful donors. We’re fully donor-funded. We do get USDA food, but we are funded solely by donations. Our donors are probably looking at their own future and the economic uncertainty, and they’re also facing higher prices on food and everything else, so looking ahead, our job is going to become much more difficult. 

What are some things that you’re doing in response to this?

A few months back, you may have heard about the Commodity Credit Corp. funding for USDA food. That was cut very early in the administration, so we had 16 truckloads of food that were slated to come here, and those were all canceled, and they were largely frozen meat and dairy, which are the two most expensive categories for us to purchase. All of a sudden they were just not going to come. We didn’t have protein on order, and we didn’t have it budgeted, so we spent $1 million to procure the 400,000 pounds of food that was lost due to that cut. We are currently spending more per month on purchased food than we did the entire year of 2019, and that’s just right now. With the cuts coming our way over time, we know it’s not a sustainable budget that we can just keep purchasing more and more, we just won’t have the budget for that. Typically, USDA runs about 25% to 30% of our inventory. Currently it’s 10%. During COVID, it was 50%, so our job is going to become much harder.

Are you dipping into reserves at this time?

Yes we are.

How do you personally handle the stress of that?

It is stressful because you think this whole team works tirelessly toward a goal of feeding people who don’t know where their next meal will come from. They rely on our partners to provide that food to them. If more people continue to access those partners, there’s going to be less food. If more people are trying to access the same amount of food, there’s just less to go around. As we see USDA cuts, it makes a big difference to us in our inventory and our budget.

I’m looking for the positive in this, because I always try to find the good thing and make it bigger. We are making a big difference in people’s lives.

Is there more pressure on your fundraisers?

They’re looking at new and innovative ways to raise funds. We have fantastic donors, people who are really dedicated to our cause and committed to the mission, but we’re also looking to expand that. How can we reach more people? How can we get more people invested in our cause, and then they turn around and act as ambassadors within the community to spread the great work that we’re doing, and to get more people involved. One really great thing that’s happening right now is we’re pouring a parking lot that will add 120 parking spots specifically for volunteers. We have a wait list for our volunteers currently because so many people have enjoyed coming here, and they’re really supporting our mission. 

We are expanding our volunteer center capacity by adding additional parking spots, which allows us to buy or receive, or donate a product in bulk, and then break that down to family-size packaging or relabeling items. All of that happens in the volunteer center, so we can just expand that, allow more people in the building at a time, and have parking for them. We can also have community groups or businesses hold meetings in our multi-purpose room and then do a volunteer shift or take a tour. We’d have parking for more of that and just bring more awareness to what we do. 

There are opportunities to sponsor shifts, opportunities to sponsor a school pantry. There’s a lot of great ways that folks can get involved here. We just pulled together our fiscal year 2025 numbers and the volunteer hours this year equaled 23 full-time employees. Now, we’re a team of 50, so that’s almost half our workforce. That’s up from 18 full-time employees last year, so we’ve grown that already as far as our volunteer equivalent hours, and that allows us to be super efficient. Ninety-six cents of every dollar donated here goes directly into programming to feed more Iowans. That’s an extraordinarily high number, and the reason it is so is because of our volunteer force. We have skilled volunteers that do data entry, or they do some office duties. They help in so many different ways. They go out and speak to groups on our behalf. What that means is more food goes out the door, because we don’t have to pay 23 additional employees to get the work done. We know that number will grow over this year due to the volunteer capacity expanding. 

Let’s talk about forecasting the next year in regards to food insecurity in Iowa. How do you see it going?

I think it’s going to continue to climb, and really, there’s not an end in sight. Our hardest days are probably ahead of us, because we know we’re in the perfect storm again. We’ve had the steady rise in food insecurity since April of 2022 when those federal maximum supports were removed after COVID and the people seeking service continues to climb. Food prices continue to rise at a rate higher than most other items and that there doesn’t seem to be a cap in sight there either,  so as we’re procuring food, even with our buying power, it’s more expensive for us too so we have to buy more, but we also have to pay more, so that’s a hurdle for us. 

But what we forecast is that the need will continue to rise, and it will be more and more difficult for folks who are food insecure. A lot of the folks that visit our partners – pantries – are working, but they’re just not making a livable wage. Some are working two jobs, and it’s still just not enough to raise a family. There’s a lot of struggling happening right now that will likely become worse. Right now 1 in 8 adults in Iowa are food insecure, as well as 1 in 6 children, which equates to over 100,000 of our kids in Iowa being food insecure. That’s just simply a number that’s unacceptable, and to think about it getting higher is daunting because you want to serve everybody, and you want to make certain that everybody has what they need. 

How do you approach leadership?

I am a servant leader where I’m here to serve this team. I’m here to serve our partners. I’m here to serve the community. I believe in empowering the team, building the best team that you can. I empower them to make good decisions because I trust them. They also trust me. I always had an open door policy as the COO, I was in this building all the time, so I know all the operations and the nuances, and I know the quality of work this team provides. Sometimes it’s just getting out of the way, because they’re all so good at their jobs, and they all trust one another also. I also lead by example. They’ve seen me roll up my sleeves and do a lot of hard work too alongside them. They know that I would never ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I respect every person and every job that they do here, and they have voiced respect for me as well. I just finished meeting with all 50 employees individually as part of my first 60 days on the job, because I wanted to have time with every one of them. There was a lot of gratitude that I accepted this position, so I feel great about that. During this transition time, there was a little bit of concern and uneasiness about what might happen next with a new leader or a different leader, so, I’m grateful for the team, and it’s such a mutual, respectful relationship where everybody feels empowered.

What do you wish Iowans knew about food insecurity?

What I would like everybody to know is food insecurity is in every community. Sometimes there’s a lack of awareness that food insecurity is right where you live and it is everywhere. It’s urban, it’s rural, it’s in affluent areas. It is everywhere. Everybody deserves food. If we can raise awareness that food insecurity can look like anything, it can look like anyone, that will be a nice head start on solving the issue.

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At a glance

Hometown: Des Moines

Education: Bachelor of Science degree in psychology from Iowa State University

Family: Four grown sons and five grandchildren

Hobbies: Gardening and reading, spending time with family, spending time at the lake. 

Age: 58

Resides: Johnston

Email: tnielsen@foodbankiowa.org