During Christmas week last year, the church Jay Miller attends staged a play about the spirit of charity and giving. It was set in a modern-day mission house that had a soup kitchen and a food pantry. Miller, a man of strong religious faith, felt a bolt of inspiration that he shared with his pastor, Chad Braswell—the next person he spoke to was his colleague in the Massachusetts-based Sterling Golf Management group, Kevin Osgood.
Miller is director of golf operations across the 10-facility management company and Osgood is its longtime President and Owner. The two think very much alike when it comes to spirituality and giving back. Miller suggested that Sterling Golf uses its platform and mount a company-wide food pantry drive. As he recalls it, “All Kevin said was, ‘that’s a heck of an idea, Jay—let’s do it.’ ”
Food insecurity, a.k.a. chronic hunger, can be a daily reality for low-income families in the U.S., notwithstanding America’s general prosperity. Miller and Osgood, along 100-some NGCOA course owners who joined in when they heard the idea, share a belief that upscale public golf is particularly well suited to addressing this societal problem. The regulars at most courses have a home-away-from-home feeling about their golf venue that creates bonds, of the kind that can foster altruism and build a common cause.
Meanwhile, the community food-pantry network that crisscrosses America, bolstered in places by public-agency supports, makes it fairly easy to roll up one’s sleeves and make a difference. Whatever the contributing factors, the effort Miller and Osgood instigated clearly took hold.
“Right as we got started I called around to my GMs at the 10 Sterling Management courses and got their buy-in,” says Miller. “My next call was to the folks at Feeding America.” That’s a U.S. non-profit with a nationwide network of 200-plus food “banks” that feed more than 46 million people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other community-based agencies. Indeed, according to Forbes it’s the largest U.S. charity by revenue. Some 20 years ago, Feeding America developed an internal form of supply-demand reconciling that directs food from here to there in a rational, market-style manner. Charity, it seems, can be augmented by science just as any for-profit enterprise can.
The charity’s work with Sterling Golf moved on a fast track, much to Miller’s satisfaction. “It took all of 90 minutes to line up the 10 food banks that would support our golf courses,” recalls Miller. “That’s a pretty impressive response.” His campaign with fellow NGCOA courses went by the umbrella title, Feeding America Through Golf. It was a bit of brand borrowing that, as Miller tells it, the people at Feeding America didn’t mind a bit.
Another early step was to contact NGCOA headquarters. “I shared my idea with leadership there and asked if they would be able to help,” he says. “In particular I wanted some stage time in front of the attendees at the NGCOA’s Golf Business Conference in Orlando—Jay Karen said yes to that right away.” Granted that opportunity, Miller put his persuasion skills to work and touched off a wave of enthusiasm. “After I made my pitch I asked people to raise their hands if they thought this was a good idea,” he recalls. Out in the audience, by Jay’s rough count, "290 out of 300 hands went up.”
Along with that on-stage appeal to colleagues there was also a chat thread
on the NGCOA online forum that discussed the initiative. That’s how course operators such as Robin Dezarn got wind of the idea and became involved. Dezarn, general manager of Stonebrook Golf Club in Pace, Fla., saw Miller’s food pantry campaign as a chance to do good and at the same time contribute to the health of the business.
“I heard about it via the daily NGCOA email and it really piqued my interest,” recalls Dezarn, who was an All-American golfer at Auburn University before becoming a college coach and then detouring into the family golf business. Stonebrook Village is a gated community with the golf club as its principal amenity, so Dezarn is always looking to “involve the community and the neighborhood, in a way that gets people coming into the building more often,” as she puts it.
In communal efforts like this, positive PR and a sense of partnership between the for-profit business and its customers is naturally going to arise—whether or not the business owner had these things in mind. Golf courses very often serve as hubs of their community, such that the line where commercial activity ends and social or sporting life begins gets blurred—in a good way.
“The local Rotary Club meets in our grill every week,” Dezarn explains, “and one of our members is a Rotarian. When school lets out for the year they do a food drive specifically for kids who are underprivileged and won’t have their school meal all summer to rely on. Also, we have a lot of educators in this neighborhood, retired and active, which means there were a lot of people who understood the need first-hand.” From this and from similar experiences, she’s recognized an opportunity in golf operations to “be a good steward and a good business person at the same time.”
The participating courses found out that small incentives do a lot to stimulate donation—they also position the facility as making a bit of a sacrifice, not merely handling the organizational side. At Sterling Golf Management courses, players on the tee sheet who arrived with full grocery bags had their cart fees waived, to the tune of about $5,000 in foregone revenue. To Osgood and Miller that was a minimal price to pay given the success of the effort company-wide. In the Sterling effort alone, the take was 800-plus pounds of food and just about $1,000 in cash and checks.
Jennifer Barkley isn’t just a course operator who joined the bandwagon, she’s a regular food-pantry volunteer who has many a time “put the apron on” at one of the local church pantries, and guided her children to do the same. Barkley is co-owner with her husband Greg of Kirkwood National Golf & Cottages in Holly Springs, Miss., 30 miles southeast of Memphis, Tenn. The pair settled on a free bucket of range balls as their basic inducement to Kirkwood golfers, with one additional wrinkle—as Jennifer explains it:
“We host a weekly member scramble and the season for it was just starting, so that was an easy time to be making a price adjustment on the entry fee,” she says. “I told players the fee was $5 more than it actually was and that they could bring some canned goods to save $5 or alternatively we could shop with their money. A few brought in food, but the majority either didn’t know or didn’t have an opportunity to bring anything. All of their $5 donations went a long way at the store.”
At Stonebrook Golf Club, league play—which is sponsor-supported—became a platform for the food drive. During drive week there was an unexpected cancellation by one of the weekly sponsors. The food collection program was substituted in, which produced some nice exposure. “We announced a reward of an extra drink ticket for every bag of groceries,” says Dezarn. She’s also had experience with food drives where the incentive was a cart-fee-only round of golf.
Here in the 2020s, the golf-and-charity connection isn’t exactly what it used to be, for purely common-sense business reasons: Demand for play by rank-and-file golfers has made it difficult for GMs to okay a takeover of the golf course for those full-field or even partial-field shotguns that 501(c)(3) groups were very much in the habit of staging.
“It’s a balancing act,” says Barkley. “We don’t do any Saturday tournaments, and we used to do quite a few of them.” The increasing success of Kirkwood’s stay-and-play cottages, which were built on a section of the golf property some 20 years ago, has been a significant factor in reducing the number of fundraiser tournaments. Covid-19 and the post-pandemic surge in golf interest just adds to it. Prior to Covid, she would have golfers calling in for tee times lament that group events were shutting them out. “The fundraiser tournaments we still host are near and dear to our hearts,” Jennifer says, including one that supports a college scholarship fund and another that’s vital to the historic preservation of a treasured antebellum home in town.
Stonebrook has experienced a similar dynamic. “We’ve cut way back on charity fundraisers,” Dezarn says. “Our course will do about 20 in a year, where we used to do more like 30 or even 40.” From a business standpoint, in Dezarn’s view, it relieves some of the organized chaos that a golf operations staff confronts when the incoming group—mostly due to its inexperience—fails to have its ducks in row. Charity shotguns becoming less frequent means that good-cause programs a golf course can participate in without having to flood its tee sheet make particular sense, going forward.
Any course owner who feels inspired to get with this program next year will have the advantage of lessons-learned by the facility managers who were part of its initial go-round. Along with the how-to guidance above, covering donor incentives, these practical considerations also came to light:
Bear in mind that among your current regular golfers there are likely to be members of area service clubs (Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions Club, etc.) or congregants at area churches who are active volunteers in food-distribution programs. These folks are natural partners and participants for your course’s efforts.
Physically and visually, your centerpiece will be the watermelon crates or similar oversized containers to be loaded with food cans, bottles and other packages. A food drive’s momentum will always be fueled by the sight of these containers steadily filling up. Showing them on social media is a go-to form of promotion.
As always in golf operations, weather can be a wild card and alternate time slots should be selected in advance to offset poor conditions during the days you originally advertised as the donation period. Lack of cooperation from Mother Nature led to adjustments and workarounds for quite a few of the courses that joined this effort in 2024.
For courses looking to do a bit more, a natural extension of a food-drive program would be a school-supplies drive, such as the one Stonebrook Golf Club has set up. Obviously, the logistics of a food effort are made ultra-simple by the fact that we all go to the supermarket on a regular basis, whereas most people shop at an office supplies store only rarely. Dezarn suggests getting hold of a standard list of items that schools and teachers are always in need of. Many will indeed be for sale in supermarkets and at the big chain pharmacies. It also works, she says, to encourage contributions in the form of checks or gift cards.
Depending on your location and the scale of your food-and-beverage business, there could be a benefit in donating food from your own kitchen’s operation. In Sterling Golf’s home base of Massachusetts, restaurant dumpsters are regulated and routinely weighed. Avoidance of fines for going over weight can be achieved by working with the state’s robust food-recycling program, which has a food-donation component built into it.
For all its success, the 2024 drive goes in the books for Jay Miller as a trial run, with future iterations promising far more significant outcomes. He’s enthused by the NGCOA’s plans to get even more involved next year and he’s targeting media giants like Golf Channel and ESPN to likewise join the cause. He’ll also be sure to adjust the timing, potentially hitting the calendar “just after Mother’s Day and before the end of the school year,” in his words. Fellow course owners who have taken a leadership role have made the case for mid-June timing, weather being the consideration.
“We’re looking to involve at least 300 courses next time around,” he says enthusiastically, citing that number as “critical mass” for the big media companies. “I feel sure we can get there.”