“That’s never happened to me before.”įor Jeff Rommel, the outgoing Food Bank of Iowa board chair and a senior executive at Nationwide, Book’s background of corporate savvy and community impact wasĪ huge selling point. Delivering a talk about the Food Bank of Iowa’s work to an audience at Nationwide, she went off-script and got choked up. “For me, it’s real, it’s intrinsic and, sometimes, it’s overwhelming,” Book says. The ability to do work so close to home has deepened her professional purpose. Now I work as hard-probably harder and longer hours-for people I actually meet.”īook’s passion for food security was sparked on trips to India and Mexico to oversee grant-making initiatives for DuPont Pioneer. I come from a place where I was a cog in the wheel of shareholder value. “This sounds cliché, but I was finding myself asking, ‘Who is Michelle Book, and what do I want my legacy to be?’ I want to be a supportive, loving mother and a good daughter and friend. “I would never have pictured myself single at 55 and the CEO of a nonprofit,” Book says. The position she’d held for five years in a department she rebuilt and expanded was eliminated. Her switch to the nonprofit sector came after personal and career shakeups caused her to re-evaluate her priorities. But Book, who earned a reputation as a polished community leader through her professional work and civic involvement, never imagined herself here. In some respects, taking the helm at the Food Bank is a natural fit for a former farm girl whose first job was walking beans in Jefferson, Iowa, at age 11.

For me, that’s extremely gratifying and frightening at the same time.” “I wear all the hats the buck stops here. “Even though I’ve been on a board, now the table is turned,” she says. In her previous role, she worked with numerous nonprofit organizations, but Book admits there are unknowns as she settles in on the staff side of charitable work. In Polk County alone, 55,000 people experience hunger every day.īook’s leadership offers a fresh perspective, an expansive network, and systems and processes honed in the corporate world. Yet the majority of our agricultural yield goes to feed livestock while 1 in 5 Iowa children struggles to get nutritious meals. Here, where corn and soybean fields take up entire vistas, hunger can seem like an anomaly. The organization’s vision-a hunger-free Iowa-is bold in the face of statistics that tell us 1 in 8 Iowans lacks the resources to ensure a stable, healthful diet. The former DuPont Pioneer senior manager for international community relations took over as CEO and president of the Food Bank of Iowa in February, after the retirement of its executive director, Carey Miller. At the Food Bank of Iowa, amid its 48,000 square feet of warehouse space, Michelle Book embraces all these challenges.

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