For Robert Egger, life has not been a journey on a single, straight path.
He grew up in Springfield and attended Lee High School and was inspired to be a nightclub manager after watching Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca” with his mother at the age of 13.
These days, he is the founder and director of D.C. Central Kitchen, which takes the premise of fighting hunger and expands it to provide food, counseling, job training and employment to hundreds of homeless and other displaced people throughout the Washington D.C. area.
“WHEN I saw ‘Casablanca,’ I decided I wanted to run a nightclub, so I decided not to go to college but to focus intensely on what I wanted to do,” Egger told high school students at the Potomac School Wednesday morning. “I wanted to learn everything about how to run a good nightclub, which meant a little science, a little business, a little people skills.”
Eventually he began working in jazz clubs in the District because he was curious about “what kind of people came to those shows. One night, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go serve food to the homeless people that slept outside.”
Seeing homeless people was nothing new to Egger, having spent most of his life living in the Washington D.C. area, but the long line of people waiting to get some food front tent during a drizzly night shook him, putting faces with the often faceless problem.
“It was like a scene from a movie, when you can’t really see anything but the outline of people because it’s dark and rainy,” he said.
It occurred to him that the nightclub he worked at threw away food every night, while the group his friend was working with was purchasing theirs from the Safeway in Georgetown.
“This group was doing the best they could, but I had this nagging question of who was really being served by this,” Egger said.
It was after that night, he said, that he came to a split in his life, a point where he could remain on the path he’d been traveling or move in an entirely different direction.
“I was going around to people and telling them I had a great idea, to somehow collect the food that restaurants would throw away at the end of the night and give people a central place to come and eat it,” he said. “We could also find a way to help the people coming in for food get jobs in the restaurant business and maybe get back on their feet.”
Much like his earlier hesitance to help feed the hungry, Egger was told over and over that his idea was a good one, but no one wanted to try it for themselves.
“IF YOU make someone dependent on you for something basic, like food, without offering a way out, that’s bondage,” he said.
Egger began his quest of combining meals with job opportunities and training, and the original D.C. Central Kitchen opened the same day at the first president George Bush was inaugurated in 1989.
“I called the Bush White House and offered to inaugurate our kitchen and the president on the same day,” he said. “That was our first large donation. Every media outlet in the country covered our opening, and here were all these homeless people eating lobster bisque and roast beef, all this glamorous food the President was eating earlier.”
He expected to receive phone calls and donations of money and time from around the country shortly after that day, and he did receive those, he said. But what surprised him most were the calls for help.
“People were calling to ask if we’d send a meal to their grandmother who couldn’t afford food and her medicine, or a job to their brother who was just getting out of jail or to start an after school program so mothers wouldn’t worry about their children being safe,” Egger said.
Hunger, he realized, was not just about giving people food.
“We set up a program to train the homeless to work in the kitchens of the restaurants that gave us food,” he said. “We had two trucks that went out every day to give people breakfast, and there were social workers who went out with the trucks and tried to convince the people we’d feed to come to the kitchen that night to have a place to sleep. Hopefully the social workers could get people into drug treatment programs, and then into transitional housing and then into a job.”
D.C. Central Kitchen was not only providing a meal, he said, it was providing a relief from hunger. The program could also potentially save the agencies it worked with millions of dollars each year by bringing those who needed help into one area, and that money could be used to support their outreach programs and the services they provide.
“We were open seven days a week and providing 4,000 meals every day,” he said.
THIS WEEK, D.C. Central Kitchen will graduate its 59th class into food service jobs, Egger said. “I had a stereotype of who was hungry and now we’re finding ways of fighting stereotypes.”
When former president Bill Clinton and his wife, now Senator Hillary Clinton, were working in the kitchen one day, the image on televisions across the country was of the president standing next to prisoners. “We provided not only skills and food for people but we were able to get a lot of people thinking about their own communities,” he said.
The greatest gift people have to give is “the ability to give,” Egger said.
Currently, there are 70 other programs similar to the one he started throughout the country, he said, with a new project that uses cafeterias in schools and college campuses to provide meals for the needy or elderly in communities across the country.
“We’re trying to help people realize that everyone has something to offer,” he told the students.
The question of how to eliminate hunger in its many forms still remains, he said.
“We need to have a larger discussion about how to take care of people to eliminate the problems,” he said. “We need to look at what words like homeless mean and what causes it so we can solve the problem.”
One thing that might be preventing that discussion from happening is the division among non-profit organizations, all vying for a portion of the $850 billion the charity industry receives annually, he said.
“As long as all non-profit pieces keep fighting over funding, we’ll never take care of all the problems in our society,” he said. “The sick, the hungry, the mentally ill, the addicted, they’ll remain disenfranchised.”
Everyone wants to do something big with their lives, he said. “It’s the combination of head and heart at the same time” that makes the biggest difference, he said.
It is the duty of every generation to respectfully try to do better than the generation that came before, he said. “Don’t be a passive volunteer. If something is working right, tell everyone. But if something could be done better, make suggestions. Speak up. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re too young.”
WHEN EGGER finished his presentation, the applause lasted for several minutes, until he sheepishly grinned and motioned for the students to stop clapping.
“This is one of the best speakers we’ve had in my four years here,” said ethics teacher David Grant. “He was able to connect with the audience and tapped into the energy and passion the students have to get involved.”
Egger’s admission of hoping to return to the nightclub business was an important reminder to the students to not give up on their dreams and goals, Grant said. “I’ve never heard anyone incorporate those ideas like that. You can have your dream job and still make a difference.”
For senior Lolly Cunningham, Egger inspired her to take her volunteer work to Denison University in the fall.
“I never heard of someone solving a problem from so many different angles all at once,” she said. “He’s not looking for a quick fix but a real solution.”
“A lot of people feel obligated to help, but it’s inspiring that people would try to take it to the next level,” said Axel Cooper, another senior. “I never opened my eyes to the larger problem of hunger. It makes you want to go out and do something.”
Egger had mentioned the disparity for treating mental versus physical illness in America, Cooper said, which he had not really thought about much before.
“There’s more of a stigma associated with” mental illness, Cooper said. “It’s really sad because people who struggle with mental illness have a greater challenge than those with physical challenges because of that stigma.”
Senior Molly Ryan said Egger’s message “really helped changed my views on homelessness. By his personality, you can tell he loves what he does. He’s funny but he’s very serious about what he’s doing.”
Enrolled at Georgetown University for this fall, Ryan said she hopes find out what the cafeteria there does with extra food and maybe try to get the university to donate to the Central Kitchen.
“Even here at Potomac, I want to find out what we do with the extra food we have every day and see if we could donate our food to them,” she said. “I definitely want to take this with me and tell others about it.”