The Capital Region Food Program had no need for tech support when it began as a holiday food basket distribution project several decades ago.
The whole of its record-keeping required just a pen and paper. Its mission could be accomplished, according to Charlie Bristol, with “people talking to people.”
Humbly, Bristol, who chairs the program’s technology committee, still thinks the organization could manage to battle hunger in central New Hampshire in the 21st century without his Information Technology expertise. It does create efficiencies that help others do the real work: feeding the hungry.
“I’m not a vision kind of person, that’s a skill that’s huge. I’m very happy being in the back room, being the person who makes sure there’s infrastructure in place that’s going to work, that they can use to carry out their objectives. I like being able to support things, so people are doing their jobs and they aren’t even thinking about the technology,” he said.
Bristol has volunteered his time with the Capital Region Food Program for three decades, helping to package and distribute holiday meals, lending his IT know-how to efforts to modernize the organization’s workflow, and joining its board of trustees.
His contributions have facilitated the project’s hunger-relief mission and helped the organization become more than the sum of its parts.
“Charlie has been a tremendous supporter, ambassador, advocate and champion of our mission,” said Maria Manus Painchaud, chair of the organization’s board. “Charlie’s unyielding commitment is evident not only through his longevity but clearly by his actions and contributions to the well-being of the organization and those we serve.”
Bristol, who lives in Concord, joined the Capital Region Food Project on the frontlines of its holiday food distribution program one winter in the early ’90s.
Snow and slush threatened to impede the project’s food distribution, so Bristol, who owned a four-wheel drive vehicle, stepped up as part of a cavalry of drivers delivering packages to people enduring food insecurity in and around Concord.
The experience opened his eyes.
“You’d stop by someplace and bring these packages in to folks who were struggling to get by. Their environment was not great, things were messy or in disarray, but they were happy to be receiving the food. That really made an impression on me,” he said.
In subsequent years, the organization fazed out direct deliveries and instead adopted a satellite approach with pick-up points where volunteers could meet recipients halfway.
The work of putting together food packages, building boxes and palletizing them was still labor-intensive, and “purposely so,” Bristol said.
“It was an opportunity for people not only to come in and volunteer their time but their effort,” he said.
In January of 1995, Bristol was recruited to the program’s board of trustees, where he served as secretary for 30 years. He kept the minutes at his last board meeting in June but has since continued to support the organization’s technology committee, a natural application of his professional experience in the IT world.
Bristol started out as a programmer in the late ’70s and went on to administer mainframe communication systems at what was then known as the United Life and Accident Insurance Company. After 22 years at the insurer, Bristol moved on to work with a number of different operating systems at Concord Hospital, just as Linux was gaining widespread adoption.
Almost 20 years later, he hung up his coding pen, having spent his last year and a half working on the hospital’s email system and ensuring a smooth hand-off with his successors.
He relies on the technical and experiential lessons of his career to support the Capital Region Food Project’s mission.
“It gave me a conceptual understanding of things that needed to be addressed,” he said. “I was fortunate to have a lot of the right skills at the right time when they were needed.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic constraining in-person communication, Bristol used his knowledge of email management and G-Suite to keep volunteers connected.
With the several hundred applications for the holiday food basket project, the ability to digitize and organize recipient information became a life raft for the nonprofit’s all-volunteer staff.
And with an organization that funds its hunger-relief work exclusively through donations and grants, the ability to quickly distill the program’s impact into numbers and statistics helped grant writers earn the attention and investment of large donors.
“Companies that provide grants are looking to make sure that their money is being well spent, so if we’re providing grant foundations with, ‘Here’s what we’re doing with your money,’ then we’re creating an objective justification for how we function and how we’re spending their money,” he said.
Bristol’s practical contributions, like moving data that previously passed from one person to another on a physical USB “stick” into the Cloud, allowed the Capitol Region Food Project to continue moving forward in its work without obstruction.
” Some of these volunteers are raising a family, working, these people in those positions are putting in tremendous hours. So, being able to provide some tools that simplify that stuff makes everybody’s life easier,” Bristol said.
Earlier this month, Bristol was inducted into the Mark E. Manus Honor Society in recognition of his contributions to the Capital Region Food Program.
The organization distributes over 110 tons of food annually, both through donations to local agencies and directly to individuals through the holiday project.