
Julie Yurko, ’90, leads Northern Illinois Food Bank into a new age.
In her work as CEO of Northern Illinois Food Bank, Julie Yurko believes in a few key building blocks to success: building strategy ahead of time, measuring results and being committed to the mission.
“People talk about praying over results, and when you pray over results, you don’t know if you’re doing everything right,” Yurko said. “We don’t pray over results. We figure out what levers we need to pull to do what we want to achieve, and then we pull those levers.”
After two years of wild challenges brought on by the global pandemic, and now a mix of food supply-chain disruption and inflation, Yurko, her team, food bank volunteers and the neighbors the organization serves have learned to be flexible, to adapt to new situations and to reach people in new ways.
“We are committed to tracking the number of neighbors we serve every month,” Yurko said. “We want to be sure we’re reaching at least 90% of the people who have been identified as food-insecure in Northern Illinois.”
Before the pandemic, the food bank was serving an average of 287,000 people a month, and in the fall of 2020, it was nearly double at 500,000 people a month. While that number came down for a time in 2021, recent obstacles for families have driven that need up again.
“Since March, we have been serving well over 400,000 neighbors again,” Yurko noted. “We are attributing this trend to inflation, for sure. It’s there for all of us. Going to the grocery store, I am looking at prices and thinking, ‘Wait, wait, do I really want these eggs?’” As costs mount, food-insecure families have lost many of the federal benefits, increased workers unemployment, rent forgiveness and the child tax credits that got them through the height of the pandemic.
“Our neighbors are seeing less income coming in with inflation. Our food supply is disrupted, and our need is increasing, and those are our major challenges,” Yurko said. “A lot of people don’t know that one-third of the grain comes out of Ukraine. So, as those fields are being burned, we are finding it more difficult to get the grain-based products we need. Along with inflation, we have to think about the cost of diesel for our fleet of 35 trucks. Two years into a pandemic, all of that is making it harder for us to do our work.”
During the pandemic, the U.S. federal government gave more food to food banks, but Yurko says those donations are back to pre-pandemic levels now.
“This year, we are stretching to serve 80 million meals for our neighbors. Last year, we distributed 100 million meals, and the differential is government food,” she said.
With all the bad news out there, Yurko insists there is much to be hopeful about. She whole-heartedly believes her organization and others like it will change the charitable food system one person at a time.

The USDA’s annual survey reports that 60% of American households that are considered food-insecure do not come to local food banks or food pantries for food, either because they do not know about the services, cannot get to the services or feel shame or perceive a stigma associated with charitable food. Yurko and her team are chipping away at this staggering number every day with calculated planning, innovative strategy and new models of distribution.
The food bank is committed to providing food in the way that our neighbors need and want, based on their culture, their history and what makes them happy when its sitting on their plate. However, Yurko understands that not everyone is comfortable receiving food the same way. Because of that, the food bank not only offers physical pantry locations but also an online food pantry, My Pantry Express, where neighbors can order online and either pick up food or have it delivered by Door Dash for free. Lastly, they also rely on mobile markets to serve people within their communities.
Yurko notes that neighbors in the Hispanic community may not come to food banks out of a fear of having to give a lot of information, and there may be a lack of trust. Mobile food markets allow people to show up at a predetermined place and pick up groceries with fewer questions. In light of this, Northern Illinois Food Bank recently partnered with La Chiquita, a Hispanic grocery store chain in the Chicago area, to try to reach more families who are in need.
“We want to look at who is not coming to us, understand why and offer access in different ways,” she said. “We offered a mobile food market at La Chiquita in Montgomery, Illinois, on a Saturday morning in February. We had done some advertising, and we’d brought enough food for 200 families. We sold out after 10 minutes!”
Yurko is encouraged with the LaChiquita partnership and has returned to the store, continuing to serve more neighbors there. The food bank is also asking 20 food pantries within their network to try new methods to grow access and awareness.
“Eighty percent of our food goes out through food pantries, and we are asking those pantries to break down barriers to service,” she said. “We’re asking them if they can add a service or if they can be open for longer hours. For some pantries, you have to have a certain zip code to receive services or come during certain hours. Can these pantries remove that restriction?” Yurko is energized by this small network of pantries who are taking the first steps toward change.
“I love being on these calls and seeing our pantry partners,” she said. “These are nonprofits who do not have a big budget, less than $50,000 a year, and most of them volunteers. But they are all trying new and different things, and they are seeing the vision of a changed charitable food system.”
With all this intentional work, Yurko believes she is seeing the first signs of positive change. For the last three years, the food bank conducted a brand awareness study, and one of the questions they asked was about how likely a person would be to recommend someone go to a pantry if they needed help. While 52% of the people said they would recommend a food pantry in 2020, that number increased to 64% in 2021.
“I’ll take that!” Yurko said with a smile. “If we do that for a few years, and we get to three-fourths of the people, then we will be starting to see some significant change.”
The food bank places strategic advertisements to increase awareness of their services, including bus ads, radio ads and billboards, echoing the message that there is a system in place for those who are food-insecure that is caring and loving.
“I think it’s working,” Yurko said. “In my opinion, whenever you have something like a pandemic, where you have a huge group of people who are financially stressed and needing a little help, everybody knows somebody who is impacted, which really reduces the stigma. Many people think you have done something wrong if you need some help, rather than that life has happened to you. Everyone can understand a pandemic hitting and the repercussions that follow.”
Yurko remains dedicated to the people who need help and, for whatever reason, still do not come to the food bank to get what they need.
“I want to find those folks, I want to make sure they have the information they need, and I want to be sure they can get the food, whether it’s brought to them or they’re shopping for it, and I want to make it more socially acceptable,” Yurko said. “I want to make the experience like shopping at Goodwill. When we shop Goodwill and find that thing we want, we tell others. ‘Look at my new shoes! I got them from Goodwill. Aren’t I smart? But we don’t have that in the charitable food sector.”

Even as it evolves with the times, the food bank’s strategy remains simple— to be a human-centered organization putting the person seeking help at the center of all its decisions.
“If, in some small way, by doing this work, I can help people feel valued and seen and cared for, I want to do that,” Yurko said. “If there is a moment in the day when someone comes to us, they feel appreciated by our community, that’s what keeps me going. Because we all have been in that place where we don’t feel seen or heard, and if we can change that somehow through food, then that’s a big win!”
While Yurko’s enthusiasm for her work is palpable, one does have to wonder how she stays optimistic amidst mounting challenges.
“The only time I have felt like it was too heavy was at the beginning of the pandemic and the really, really, really long lines,” she said. “I’d show up to a distribution, and I’d have to catch my breath because there would be all of these cars, and many of the folks in those cars would be stressed or crying.”
Yurko credits her amazing team of staff and volunteers with keeping the food bank running even in the worst of times. She notes that she never has to remind her team why they come to work each day.
“Folks here feel very motivated by and care deeply for our mission. Folks with a strong faith feel called to this work. And on our employee engagement surveys, the highest rated response is always our commitment to mission,” Yurko noted. “If I can provide a really clear framework of this is how we know that we’re winning, then the team knows we’re making an impact. The reward for them is not on stock options. The return for them is we are achieving our mission impact.”
That commitment was clear during the earliest days of the pandemic when volunteers showed up regardless of risks and donors who invested despite economic uncertainties. Because of this, 90% of the food bank’s 350 food pantries were able to stay open when people needed them most.
“Quite frankly, there was a point early on in the pandemic when some of our team members said, ‘I didn’t sign up for this! Are you kidding me?! The whole world is staying home, and you’re telling me to come in?’” Yurko said. “And I said, “You’re right. None of us took this job at the food bank thinking we were going to be front lines in a pandemic. And if you can’t do it, we love you, and we understand. But not our team. They just kept showing up and, together, we distributed 100 million meals.”
Yurko noted that some of their most dedicated volunteers were people in their 60s and 70s, who insisted on coming in to pack and distribute food.
“I would ask them, ‘Do your kids know you’re here? Am I going to be getting a phone call?’ They would say, ‘Yes, they know I am here. They are not happy, but this work is saving my life,’” she said.
At the same time, Yurko is clear that the food bank is driven by results because people’s lives depend on them.
“We’re not a family, and I make that really clear,” she said. “As writer and professor Adam Grant recently said, families don’t have layoffs during tough times or fire you for poor performance. But we do care deeply about our team members, and we want them to do well. To quote Brené Brown, ‘Clear is kind.’”
That clarity of mission is what keeps moving Northern Illinois Food Bank forward, no matter what lies ahead.
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