Falls Church’s own Mike Curtin, a resident here over 30 years, has to be considered among the Little City’s greatest contributions to the betterment of the species in this entire region and beyond.
The CEO of the D.C. Central Kitchen, which now delivers over 16,000 nutritional meals daily to the needy in the nation’s capital and employs over 320 people in the process, Curtin came to the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce’s annual non-profit fair this week to deliver passionate remarks to over 40 of this area’s top non-profit leaders.
The event was held in the fellowship hall of the historic Falls Church Episcopal Church with display tables and literature spread around describing the considerable benefits that scores of these organizations provide with mostly volunteers to help.
In the midst of this, Curtin’s message was an inspiration, like a clarion call to the whole notion of making the world a better place through compassionate and dedicated service. He has grown the D.C. Central Kitchen from a $500,000 operation in 2004 to over an annual $16 million one with a culinary job training program that trains formerly incarcerated, addicted, homeless or chronically unemployed persons and his impact is felt worldwide through his speaking engagements, received honors and an overall spreading of the word of his formula for success.
In a nutshell, he told the N-P, it is to “focus like a laser” on the mission, which to him is to offer “not a hand out, but a hand up.”
“To elevate, empower and liberate, this is our goal,” he said. “Food itself will never end hunger, but it is a means to lift people up out of poverty. It is not our meals, as important as they are, but our training that drives our program. In addition to ones in training, there are an average of 45 volunteers a day who work out of the D.C. Central Kitchen’s new facility adjacent to the Aldi Field in Southeast D.C.
The success of the program, and Curtin’s personal success in driving it, had its start right in Falls Church and his family home for over 30 years where he has lived with his wife Maureen and their three children, Maeve, Michael III and Clara.
A 1988 graduate with a degree in religion from Williams College in western Massachusetts, a smaller version of an Ivy League school that produced other famous names like Wang Leehorn, Steve Case, Stephen Sondheim and Elia Kazan, Curtin worked after college in Japan as a teacher, copywriter and bartender in Osaka. Upon his return to the U.S., he launched his career in the hospitality business that involved a valiant effort at launching his own restaurant in downtown Falls Church in the late 1990s. At the location of the current Dogwood Tavern in the 100 block of W. Broad St., Curtin took a hands-on approach to a major renovation of the space, which had previously been home to the Akropol restaurant to open his Broad Street Grill.
While many of the renovations of the space are still functioning for owners of the Dogwood, Curtin describes his four years there as his first effort at running a “non-profit.” It was not to be, even though he had become an important fixture with the local Chamber of Commerce and his restaurant had won a business award from the City.
His idea for the restaurant, however, was completely valid and has animated his efforts ever since. That is, that the goal of a restaurant is to create a community place, a place where people get together, and gather to be part of something bigger. “There is a reason that the TV sitcom, Cheers, was so popular in its day,” Curtin said. “It’s because we all want to be part of something where ‘everyone knows your name.’”
With the closing of his restaurant, however, Curtin had no idea of what to do next. He took a job with the DCCK in 2004 thanks to a boost from an important friend, Robert Egger, who ran a food distribution operation in the Foggy Bottom area from a church in Georgetown.
“We specialize in providing second chances for people at the Central Kitchen,” Curtin told his Chamber of Commerce audience this Tuesday, “and going into the Central Kitchen was my second chance.” He’s made the most of it.
In the face of the Great Recession of 2008, First Lady Michele Obama came to visit the site in 2010 and she influenced the program’s turn to providing meals in seven schools in D.C., expanded now to 30. As the program has grown and done more to make the meals healthier, it has also moved to locally-sourced ingredients, a “farm to shelter” approach.
Curtin has become an important national spokesman for the benefits of non-profits in our society and economy. “There are no profits without non-profits,” he asserted in his speech Tuesday. “We need both, and both need to be equally celebrated and sought after.”
He noted that 10 percent of U.S. companies are now non-profits and account for six percent of the economy. Taken by themselves, their net economic impact is slightly less than South Korea but more than Saudi Arabia.
He said that rather than the advice which asserts that non-profits should become more like for-profit businesses, it is actually the other way around. “If a strictly business model was so successful and the answer to everything, non-profits wouldn’t exist,” he contended.
Among Curtin’s major successes operating the DCCK has been the annual Capital Food Fight fundraiser in downtown D.C. This year was its 20th anniversary and over $900,000 was raised, he said. Never to forget about the Falls Church community that he comes home to every night, two important Falls Church restaurants, the Little City’s acclaimed new Ellie Bird and Clare and Don’s Beach Shack, were represented among the 84 from the wider region.
