In the lobby of Akron General hospital Wednesday, Dan Flowers was moved to song.
The occasion was the surprise announcement that the Cleveland Clinic, which Akron General is affiliated with, would donate $3 million to the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank. It’s among the largest single donations the food bank has received, said Flowers, the CEO.
In accepting the gift, Flowers asked the gathered food bank and hospital employees to join him in singing an old hymn, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.”
“Morning by morning, new mercies I see,” he sang. “All that I needed, thy hand has provided.”
The gift, which will be spread over five years, moved food bank employees like Leslie Genovese to tears.
“This is transformational,” said Genovese, the agency’s corporate partnership executive. “It’s amazing. It almost leaves you speechless. Gifts of this size do not happen every day.”
Flowers, in an interview, said when he came to Akron General Wednesday to honor the Cleveland Clinic with the food bank’s Apple Award, he had a hunch something was going to happen, but “certainly not at this level.”
He thinks about the hymn, and the new mercies line, a lot in his job, he said. In an organization that’s dependent on donations of food and money, he said, “every gift is an act of grace for me.”
“It’s one of the biggest commitments we ever had, no doubt about it,” Flowers said. “This is a huge gift.”
‘You can think about thriving’
It comes at a time when federal contributions to food pantries have fallen and need has risen, Flowers said. Corporate layoffs, government shutdowns and rising costs have led more people to seek help than the food bank was assisting during the COVID-19 pandemic, Genovese said.
Donors stepped up to help fill in the gaps from funding cuts, but Flowers said he worried about how the food bank would replace millions of pounds of food each year.
“This is going to help us cover it,” he said. “At the very least, it’s going to help keep us whole. It’s why it affected me. It’s just lightened our load a little bit today.”
The Cleveland Clinic has given $62 million to address food insecurity across its footprint since 2023, said Vickie Johnson, the executive vice president and chief community officer for the hospital system. She said the Clinic has the resources and wants to show up. The bulk of that money has been given in Northeast Ohio.
Last year, the Cleveland Clinic gave $150,000 to the food bank.
Johnson said she hoped the gift would help expand what the food bank can offer, in addition to stabilizing its losses.
What will the money help the food bank do?
In a statement, the groups said the money would:
- Increase access to healthy food in underserved communities where access to fresh, nutritious food is limited.
- Expand weekend and summer meal programs so local students don’t face hunger when school is out.
- Provide financial stability to plan multi‑year initiatives, expand capacity and respond to community needs.
Akron General’s president, Teri Lash-Ritter, who worked in dietetics before becoming a family medicine doctor, said she knows how important access to food is for individuals. She’s been on the food bank’s board for six years and is currently the vice chair; she’ll take over as chair in 2027.
Lash-Ritter said she was thrilled to support the food bank in this way.
“It allows the food bank to dream a little,” she said.
Johnson, for her part, noted that the two would be partners for “a very long time.” She told Flowers that she was getting choked up as she and others presented a giant check to the organization that Lash-Ritter called a partner and Flowers called a sibling.
“We want to end hunger in the community today,” Johnson said. “We want to make sure you don’t have to think about surviving. You can think about thriving.”
