In this episode of the RKD Group: Chat podcast, we’re thrilled to feature Thomas Mantz, President and CEO of Feeding Tampa Bay. From a challenging start in school to leading one of the nation’s most impactful hunger-relief organizations, Thomas shares his inspiring journey into the nonprofit world.
In this conversation, he dives into the pivotal role of volunteering, the importance of aligning personal values with organizational missions, and his leadership philosophy centered on building capacity and empowering teams.
Show chapters
- 00:00 From Security Guard to Nonprofit Leader
- 11:45 Finding Purpose in Nonprofit Work
- 18:57 Leadership Philosophy and Building Capacity
- 24:05 Creating a Community Center
- 28:47 The Heart of Service and Human Connection
Meet our guest
Transcript
Kate McKinley
Hello and welcome back to RKD Group: Chat, the podcast that tells the stories of nonprofit professionals who have dedicated their careers to service. In this episode, I sat down with Thomas Mantz, the president and CEO of Feeding Tampa Bay.
From a student struggling to perform in high school to his role today at Feeding Tampa Bay, Thomas's story is built on hard work and a willingness to learn and try new things. Let's start by hearing Thomas share how a role as a security guard out of high school led to a tremendous career journey and a calling to commit his care to the service of others.
Thomas Mantz
Well, I don't know that that's a simple answer. So I was a kid that did not perform well in high school, was not a good student by nature, just wasn't comfortable in the environment. So I went to work right out of high school. And so I had a couple of different jobs. And I lucked into a security guard job at a large facility for a big corporation. And while I was there, I got to know the woman that ran HR and she must have seen something in me that I didn't see in me, because I was just, you know, walking a guard post and she said, you know, we've got entry-level jobs, you ought to apply for one. And I said, I don't, I don't really think I could do anything that you all. And she's like, just, just apply. And so I, and I got my first job and I was an office assistant. So I delivered the mail, I sorted, I separated, I packaged, I ran errands for a group of about 50 managers. Myself and another person, we answered phones. This is of course a bit ago. Your listeners will not see, but I'm in my 60s and so I'm towards the end of my career. But it was a good start in and I found that I had a facility for the work, right? I found that I had a good work ethic.
I found an environment where I really felt like I belonged and could flourish, that I was judged really on the merits of my efforts. And I know school is supposed to be that way, right? At the end of the day, your grades should reflect your efforts, but I didn't find that to be the case in the scholastic world, but I did find it to be the case in the work world. And so I started to experience some success. know, different people would see something in me. I just had two qualities that helped me immensely. One is I would outwork everybody else. I just was of that nature that I was not gonna be outworked. Mostly because I was afraid I'd get fired if I didn't, right? Crazy notion, but it drives you, right? The second thing that, a quality I found out that I had was I was willing to try new things and do different things. So invariably when someone would say, hey, there's another opportunity, would you wanna volunteer? Do you wanna learn this? My hand would go up and say, I'll go do it. I was not afraid to figure it out. And so those things really served me well. And my career grew because of it. I had those characteristics and time and again in a corporate environment, right? This is all in the for-profit world, banking and finance world. I just found myself moving my way through and up those organizations to greater and greater responsibility and more and more opportunity. So probably by the time I was close to 40 years old, was certainly in my late 30s, I had built a pretty good career. I'd gone to college at night to try and get my degree. so, along the way I found a disconnect probably between what I was doing and what I was interested in. disenchantment with the for-profit world led him to take a chance on the non-profit world. He started out as a volunteer and through that work ethic and willingness to learn, he has now found himself where he's at today.
So the corporate world offers you an awful lot of great value and return, right? If you're in that place, they compensate you well. There are lot of opportunity with that. But I found that it was not what resonated with me. And more and more, I found myself disenchanted. not with the corporate world because they are who they are, but because it didn't fit who I was. And so I actively began to kind of consider what do other people do with their lives? Because I had only taken the next job given to me my entire career. As I was trying to figure out, you know, in the corporate world, you're visited with a certain amount of success and I had that and I kept wondering why I was not satisfied with it. so I started to go out and try and do some other things.
And one of the things I decided to do was I started volunteering. Or I wanted to start volunteering. So I've shared this story many times, but I called, I was living in New York City at the time, working on Wall Street, and I called the local food bank and said, hey, I want to volunteer. Now this is about two days before Thanksgiving. And so the guy on the other end of the phone said, yeah, we don't need you. I was like, what do mean you don't need me? He said, buddy, everybody and their brother wants to volunteer at a food bank before Thanksgiving, right? You know this, right? Your listeners know this. He said, people are hungry 365 days a year, pick another day.
He hung up. Right, this is New York City, this is not altogether an unusual conversation, right? So I was not offended by him hanging up, but his words rang in my ears and I thought about them. And so probably about 60 days later, maybe three months later, I found out about and walked into an organization called God's Love We Deliver which is a nonprofit organization and had started in New York City and they were principally at that time created to provide healthy homebound meals to AIDS patients in New York City.
So think about meals on wheels, but directed at a sub population. So I would go in and I'd volunteer and some days I would, know, I'm coming from running a fairly large part of the bank's portfolio of services and I, you know, so I'd come over, but I'd volunteer and some days I would cut vegetables, some days. I'd work in the office. I still remember the volunteer coordinator, Heather, when I had my orientation, she's like, now, do you think you could answer phones? And at the time, I probably had a thousand people that were answering phones in my division, right? Whatever it was. I was like, yeah. And she said, can you read from the script? And she was wonderful, very thoughtful. I still remember her today. And I had no idea what charities were. I didn't really understand how they worked. Intellectually, I knew the concept, obviously, but I had no idea. I would sit there and I'd answer phones, right? and I'd stuff envelopes or whatever they needed me to do. But I'd look on the wall and I would see names of donors or this room is named after somebody. I remember thinking, what is like, what's all that about? Like, how does all that work? They read, I volunteered there for a while. But that, along with, as I mentioned before, just a general dissatisfaction with what I was doing, I decided to push all my chips into the middle of the table and I left. I simply cashed out, told the bank I was going to leave. gave him a month. I finished up a project I was working on, I had no clue where I was going. I just simply knew I had to leave what I was doing, right?
This isn't really the smartest career move, but it was the right, right move for me. And I had some resources to make a decision like this. And so, because I owned some property in Florida, I moved to Florida where it's easier to live without a job. And so when I got to Florida, I started volunteering again. So one of the organizations I was volunteering with, was a startup clothing distribution charity. And their value proposition was they provided brand new clothing, whereas you know Goodwill and many other terrific organizations, Dress for Success, work in the used clothes market. The concept that the gentleman that started this charity had was he had talked to a bunch of folks who were homeless. And when he asked them what they needed, they said, we don't get socks and underwear. because those can't get donated. It's a sanitary issue, which when you think about when you got dressed this morning, That's a pretty critical element, right? For women without bras, just any number of personal comfort and hygiene issues, right? So Henry, the guy that started the charity, said, well, I can figure that out. And he started talking to some friends. He was of means. And he said, hey, do you guys, he started talking to Kmart and Walmart and others and said, you must have torn packages or how can I get these things?
As it turns out, there was a significant opportunity in brand new clothing. When clothing stores or manufacturing lines would phase out their clothing lines, they would largely burn the clothing that they had because they didn't want to go on a resale market. So Henry said, well, we'll take that. so much like a food bank works today, the idea was taking the goods, get them sorted, separated, then distributed them back out to charities that are given clothing to the clothing people that need it. So I started volunteering maybe 60 days into this, into this, the life of this organization. And so they were wonderful people, but they didn't know how to set up an inventory system, know, figure out how to fulfill orders. So I came in and I helped with that, you know, and it was pretty easy to say, okay, here, let's do this, let's do that. Let's get this set up this way, et cetera. And the fellow that started the charity asked the woman that was, you know, running it for him, volunteer running it for him.
Who's the guy that's doing all this? And she said, well, he's some volunteer. I don't know anything about him. Henry said, I want to meet him. Right. So Liz, the woman tells me, Hey, Henry wants to meet. I'm like, well, who is Henry? She's like, Henry's a, Henry's a unique guy. You need to meet Henry. I'm like, I don't want to meet Henry. I'm just a volunteer here. Right. And she goes, no, gotta meet Henry. He wants to talk to you. Now, Henry, as it turns out, is a gentleman named Henry Landworth. Henry was a Holocaust survivor who spent five years in prison camps from 13 to 18 years old survived miraculously, made his way to the United States, and ultimately built hotels throughout the Orlando area in the early 70s and became quite wealthy. Henry started an organization, if your listeners ever want to know about a great organization, called Give Kids the World, which is where most Wish kids, at the time, 80 % of all Wish kids wanted to go to Disney World as their Wish. So Henry built a village where the kids could come and stay and then go over to Disney.
It's a miraculous place. It is a magical place. So Henry is this guy, I find out. Henry sits down with me and says, hey, I want you to run this thing for me. And I'm like, I don't know anything about running a charitable organization. He's like, you know how to run a business. You know how to run this. This is the same. It's like, well, Henry, I'm not really sure it is. He goes, yes, yes, it is. And Henry, he was a force of personality. Wonderful man. He died a few years back, but just a force of personality, you know, As I learned later, just, Henry's not a person you negotiate with, you just listen to. And so, so Henry looks at me and he said, here's what you need to know. We're on opposite sides of the same prayer. You need something to do with your life and I need someone to run this. Now, how do you say no to that? So I started my career running this organization called Dignity Aware. We took it from this small little charity into a much bigger charity. Eventually, I left there.
I went to the food bank in Jacksonville where I was at the time. ran the food bank there for a couple of years. Largely again, got it set up. It had some challenges it was making its way through. I helped kind of get it situated and moving forward and worked in some other venues in the nonprofit world for a while. And then the folks here at the food bank in Tampa reached out and said, hey, we're looking for somebody and ended up being a good match for them, good match for me. And so I've been here 12 years.
Kate McKninley
So Thomas admits he didn't know much about the nonprofit world when he called up his local food bank to ask about volunteering opportunities. But that single moment led him to spend time at several different human service organizations, including multiple food banks. I asked Thomas, what about this type of nonprofit organization spoke to him when he was starting his journey?
Thomas Mantz
I don't know, probably because I think now in hindsight, it's a well-known entity or commodity. And if you're in New York City, there's a lot of issues around food, right? There's a whole lot of, right?
My ex-wife used to carry granola bars instead of giving folks who are housing challenged or homeless or transitionally housed money or otherwise, right? You would give them food, right? It was a way to say, hey, I care about you as a human being. So here's a granola bar, here's, know, because I don't want to just walk by you as if you don't exist, but handing money to someone in that situation is not the best use of your funds or not the best answer for their situation.
So probably, Kate, I was just aware of it and it seemed easy enough. But I did not come from a background. My parents, I never volunteered anything that I'm ever aware of. None of my siblings ever volunteered anything that I'm ever aware of. It was not something that I saw as a part of my personality, but I would say this, and it leads to the answer to your question. Funny references to how you end up doing what you do. So I'm 10 years old and it's the summer of 1972, 73. And my mother is watching the Watergate hearing. So Kate, you can look that up, right? And it's a really important time in the life of our country, right? And folks are testifying about what happened. My mother was wrapped. She didn't miss a moment of it. She watched every minute of it. And I would talk to her and say, well, what about this? I'd watched some of it with her. I remember John Dean and all these things.
It sounds arcane, but you ask, you these things stick with you. And what I remember her saying was, this isn't just about a president and his behavior. It's about who we are as a country. It's about our responsibility to the truth. It's about our willingness to do what's right. And that stuck with me. And so all of the work I think that I do today still has those core principles attached to it. So I happened to work in a food bank.
The irony is I don't really care about food at all as a person. I'm not a culinary, right? I joke with my wife often, I see food, I'll eat it. That's just put it in front of me, I'll eat it, and then I'll do the dishes, right? But I am convinced that every single human being is worthy of investment and care, that our responsibility, not our opportunity, our responsibility is to be there for them and with them. That career journey that I told you about, I can't tell you how many people stepped in to help me along the way.
I just don't, couldn't even put a number on it. People like a guy named George Menendez, who when I was a young manager, took me under his wing and said, here's how you do this, here's how you do that, here's why you want to think about this. He didn't have to do any of that. But these people made me the person that I am. And I view our work today, what I do today, as living into that principle of the obligation and responsibility we have to look after each other. And so a food bank is a spectacularly wonderful place to do that
Kate McKninley
I love the part where Thomas shared about how his belief that every single human is worthy of investment in care and that it's our responsibility to show up for them has shaped how he approaches his day-to-day life. I think it so perfectly captures why many people in the nonprofit industry do what they do, but it also speaks to the culture Thomas and his team members have built at Feeding Tampa Bay. I think you can hear the kind of organization he has helped build through our conversation on his leadership style as well.
Thomas Mantz
The challenge, there are many challenges to leadership, particularly when you end up sitting in the, you know, in the, I should note for the listener, cubicle that I sit in, right? We don't have offices here at our food bank. Everybody just has a space, right? I think you're aware that when you occupy this spot.
The responsibility to understand that other people got you there is really important because otherwise you can start thinking you're the one that got you there. And I think I've been fortunate that I've kept some degree of fidelity to the idea that other people helped me get into this spot. Especially when you think about my origin story and where I came from, there was nothing that ever said I would sit here. The two principles that I mentioned to you earlier that I will work as hard as possible and necessary, and I'll continue to try and do different things so that it challenges me, those are still two principles I believe in 40 years into my career. And I think because of that, the gift that I've been given is not
The abilities, it's the willingness. You tend to think of, know, I as a leader, I as a human, I'm gifted in X, Y, and Z. And those things may or may not be true, but the best gift you could ever have is a willingness to continue to do things well, right, thoughtfully. So I hope, I think that good leadership is about ego deflation at depth. You have to be willing to be vulnerable. It's hard.
We have a very democratic system here. I'm not going to die wondering what any of my colleagues think, right? But we've built it that way so that everybody has a voice, everybody has a right and a responsibility. And as a leader, you have to be willing to support that. It's far easier to tell people what to do. It's far more successful to allow them to learn what to do and have them teach you what should be done. Like many in leadership positions, every day for Thomas looks a little bit different.
But he shared that his main objective each and every day is to build capacity in a number of different ways. So when people ask me my job description, I always say this. My job is to build capacity. So sometimes that's human capacity, as I just talked about. How do we, you know, how do I help the folks that work directly for me get better at what they do? How do I help us? You know, so the human side of things, how do we build an organization where we are engaging in human capacity? Right. So one is the human side. Number two is the organizational side, is it we want to do as an organization? What is our strategic plan? What do we care about? Where are we headed? How do I think about that from a capacity standpoint? We're a food bank that has materially changed our external focus or the mission imperatives that we have. We've moved far beyond just food. All that's part of my kind of imprint to say this is where I think we need to go.
as I think about the capacity of what we want to be. then of course, capacity also means what it means, which is to help us develop financial resources, other resources to do that work. Board members, cultivation, all of that, but everything that if I'm doing my job well, everything that I spend my time on, the outcome of it should be that we have greater capacity as the result of that. So that's how I think about my job. How that comes at you is, boy, every day is different as you said. I think the thing that I, over the years, I've mentored young leaders in the nonprofit world, I think the thing that always surprises them is how little of your time you manage or dictate. I think everybody thinks like once you get to the CEO role that you're just kind of, know, I'm pulling the strings, I'm making stuff happen. By the time you get to this seat, you have less control over your day, your to-do list, your wants and needs than you have ever had in your entire career.
That's either bad or good, but it certainly is true. And so a lot of what I have to do is to adapt and adjust to figure out, okay, how this problem, this opportunity, this situation came at us. What do we do about it? What do I do about it? I tend to be the person in an organization where someone has come to the end of their, you know, they've hit a wall with something they're dealing with and they walk into my, you know, workstation and say, you know, I think X, Y or Z. So I think I probably spend, I would like to spend 75 % external, 25 % internal, external meaning like how do we move the mission forward 25 % on what are we doing today? But the reality is it's probably closer to 50-50. Sometimes it's inverted, which makes that problematic because I think as the leadership role, we have really good senior officers that run everything.
Right, our COO doesn't need me at all to tell her what to do. She knows what to do better than I ever knew what to do. And so, but sometimes you can get overly busy with the things that, know, the tyranny of the moment, the tyranny of the issue, the tyranny of the day. But I think if I had my perfect druthers, I'd probably spend 35, 40 % of my life about what's going on inside these walls and 65%, 70 % on what's, do we bring the world into our work and how do we bring our work into the world? In addition to his work ethic and constant desire to learn, contributing to his success as a leader, Thomas also says that a willingness to think differently has helped him get where he is. You know, as a leader, the more that you are willing to seed control and listen, to kind of entertain broader ideas, to think differently about what you're doing. So one is learning to engage in active listening. Again, you asked about a tool, but I would say it's probably more of a tactic or a trait you have to develop. I have, over the entire course of my career, always been in some sort of learning mode. So I have taken courses, we have a book study here.
So we continue to read new literature that it kind of stimulates our thinking. I have a couple of different groups that I belong to. Very different in their focus, but they are both leadership groups that help me continue to think about things in different way. One of them is completely detached from nonprofit. It's just business leaders, right? So I think what is most important is that you continue to understand. So as I said, I'm, you know, 40 years into my career a little bit more than 40 years into my career. I think what remains important today are still those two values that I talked about, but I think the underlying part of each of those is what are you doing in furtherance of that? So if you think learning is important, what are you doing to learn? And I think I try and spend time in that as much as I can. I don't know what, you know, I shared this with somebody the other night. It's holiday season. When you're doing this podcast, I'm not sure when it is being aired. But so in our world, in the food bank, food bank world, everybody is having holiday, this holiday, that's why I can't tell you the number of events I've been to. Checks we hold up with pictures and saying thank you to folks and things of that nature. The funny part about all of this, Kate, is I am an extreme introvert. And so I had to learn to overcome that to be better at my job. You know, I had to learn to go to cocktail parties and figure out how to navigate that space. You know, so you have to learn adaptive behaviors. have to, you can't always be in situations where you're only working from your strengths. You have to learn to work off of some of your weaknesses too, right? And so I think all of that comes back to the idea, and I said this earlier in the podcast, all that comes back to the idea that if you're going to do this work well, you have a measure of self-reflection that you do.
Kate McKninley
During our conversation, Thomas shared two stories from his time at Feeding Tampa Bay with me. I think both are a testament to the culture of the organization and the heart of all who work there.
Thomas Mantz
So I'll share one recent and one older that come to mind quickly.
So we built a new facility, we've been at six months, but really what we built was not a food bank, we built a community center. So in our food bank are classrooms and gathering spaces, Causeway Hall where 500 people can fit, restaurant, grocery store, neighbor services, all of that. Because we had this idea that we wanted to build a place where everybody could come.
So, you we had the conversation as we were designing it, we wanna make sure that a person who hasn't eaten in two days and a billionaire can both walk into the facility and feel welcome. And so that was really important to us that no matter your entry place with us, that you walked in and you said, feel good here. About seven or eight days ago, last week at some point, we hosted, not us hosting the facility, hosted a workforce conference with 250 people, all walks of life, right?
They asked me to get up and make a few remarks before we started, but I was just overwhelmed with the idea that this is exactly what we wanted to be. Now, this is a nonprofit that's doing workforce development. The space that they used was free to them. We didn't charge them. They came in, they brought a bunch of people together because they want to make sure that there are other humans out there that can get a job. And I just thought, this is perfect. You know, I just, this is what I see our greatest and best use, which is bring people together to make sure that there's a future tomorrow for someone else. So that's a really recent moment, but it's probably the culmination of a dream that we've had for a long time. Now we've got to grow into the space. We're here six months, there's a lot more to be done, but I think it speaks to the spirit of what we wanted.
The second thing is if you work in food relief, you have your stories that stick with you. And there are a few, but I'll choose one from COVID. So during COVID, as you know, the pressure on food banks was staggering. You know, we run in when others run out and we don't ever want to take away from first responders, but all of us were out there the day after we knew it was COVID giving out food. None of us stopped. We all kept going. In fact, I remember having a conversation. We called all of our team together and said, look, this is going to be something. And if you need to go home, go home. But if you can be here, we need you to be here because our community needs us. No one left the room. Right. It speaks to their character. We didn't even know if we were going to have enough money to do all that we needed to do, but we were driven by the idea that our community needed us and we were going to be there, period.
We started, we set up like a lot of food banks did a mass distribution where we would get four, five, 6,000 cars on a Saturday morning lined up and we were blocking traffic for miles. And so probably our second weekend or something, I was on traffic duty for whatever reason, I always get stuck with traffic duty, right? You'd think I'd pull a better shift than traffic duty. So we started our distributions at 8 a.m. and cars started lining up at 2 a.m.
Right. People in that kind of desperation, right. That fear. And I started to walk back along the line of cars. We were getting ready to open up and there was a woman that again, they're probably Kate, 4,000 cars in line. And there's a woman that's in there like the fifth or sixth car. And she rolls down the window as I walked by it's raining, not heavy, but, there's a rain. And so I lean over to try and get my hood over her so she doesn't get wet opening her window and
She didn't speak very good English, but she looked at me and she said, goodness.
I'm sorry. She said, I don't know if I can feed my kids today. Will you have food?
And she didn't know that we had more food than she would ever need. Right?
I'll never forget her. I don't want to forget her. Because she's why we do what we do.
It's a privilege to do that. I'm not better for doing this work. I have the privilege of doing this work. One of my colleagues, Kathy Wetzel, has something on her wall that says, we don't have to do this. We get to do this. And so, you know, for your listeners, that's kind of who this environment is. That's who are the people that are helping. And I would also be remiss if I didn't say.
The people we serve are brave, hardworking, they care deeply about their responsibilities. They don't want to need help, but they do need help. And she could not have been a more deserving human being of our love and kindness. Thomas has an incredible story and an incredible heart. I so enjoyed our conversation and our time together, and I hope you did as well.
Kate McKninley
As we close out these conversations, I always like to leave listeners with one piece of advice from the people who have worked so hard to not only get where they are today, but also have felt a calling to serve others along the way. Here's what Thomas had to say.
Thomas Mantz
You know, it's funny when you think about nonprofit leaders that might listen to this, I think they already understand the answers to the questions, right? Because they're doing this work. I think, Kate, as you know, because of what RKD does, right, you're around a lot of us and understand what we're called to be and what we're asked to do, right?
But I would say, as I'm talking to you pinned on my cubicle wall are our cultural values. and the one that I probably think about more than any other is the, one of them is called stay rooted. and what that says to us, there are multiple meetings, but what it reminds me is remember what it is we're doing here. And that is to be of service to another human being who needs us in that moment.
And I think having fidelity to that, understanding that remains the priority. As we say here, nothing we do is about us. You have to understand that. You have to make that, you know, understand, make that decision going back to working in this environment. It's not about you and it never will be. It's about making sure that another human being's okay.
Group Thinkers is a production of RKD Group. For more information, including how you can partner with RKD to accelerate growth for your fundraising and nonprofit marketing needs, visit rkdgroup.com.
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