Swipe Out Hunger

Strategic Relationship Management and Staffing Lead to Transformation

Swipe Out Hunger Founding Executive Director Rachel Sumekh is a charismatic public speaker who was intuitive in her approach to fundraising and had success managing relationships with individual donors and board members. By 2019, she’d grown the organization from startup to a $600,000 operating budget as the only fundraiser on staff. But Rachel had big goals for organizational growth, including an expansion from direct service into national policy advocacy, and was beginning to plan her transition into an advisor role. 

ChangeRaisers helped Rachel shift her approach to engaging foundations, understanding they are led by people with whom relationships need to be stewarded and deepened over time, just like individual donors. The training also inspired Rachel to invest in organizational infrastructure like board training, fundraising systems and more development staff to support both organizational expansion and executive leadership transition. 

Three and a half years later, Swipe Out Hunger’s budget has increased to $1.7M+, the staff includes a Director of Development, and the board has hired a new Executive Director, allowing Rachel to step away from daily operations. Swipe Out Hunger has also grown, expanding to lead national policy advocacy addressing student hunger upstream, creating chapters in over 450 colleges across all 50 states, and serving over 4.8 million meals to students.

“Prior to ChangeRaisers, I always viewed fundraising as an art. And I walked away knowing it's also a science. This program gave me a chance to apply the learnings from our training days to real life tasks as they came up – donor meetings, fundraising events, board engagements – which made my learning richer.”

Rachel Sumekh
Executive Director
Swipe Out Hunger