Spotlight on Rudy Gomez

Director of Development, Mary’s Meals

We placed Rudy Gomez at Mary’s Meals nearly four years ago. It was a blast to sit down with him to hear about his incredible work for this important mission, as well as his recent promotion!

MA: Rudy! So great to talk to you again. How long has it been since you started at Mary’s Meals?

RG: I’m coming up on four years. I was working as a Donor Engagement Officer for several, and then just promoted to Director of Development in August. 

MA: Congratulations! You don’t stay somewhere for four years for no reason. Tell me about the mission at Mary’s Meals and why it resonates with you? 

RG: The vision of Mary’s meals is for every child to receive a daily meal in their place of education. I love that we keep it very simple here: a daily meal, at their place of education. 

We believe that if we can incentivize parents to send their child to school instead of working the fields or selling in the marketplace (maybe not for the education, but for the meal), we’re helping to equip these kids to break out of the generational cycle of poverty that exists in so many of the third world countries. 

World hunger is incredibly complicated, but we keep our solution simple. And it’s effective! We’re helping 2,429,182 children receive a meal every single day. We have the capacity to increase that number quickly—it’s just a matter of donations and revenue. There is no reason why we can’t keep feeding more and more kids! 

MA: That’s incredible. So, tell me about your role when you joined Mary’s Meals? 

RG: I started here as a Donor Engagement Officer, a grassroots fundraising role, with the task of growing our ambassador program. Mary’s Meals ambassadors are folks who feels called to support the mission beyond a donation. My job was to grow this ambassador community— supporting and encouraging them in their support for Mary's Meals - through their families, churches, corporations, and wider community. 

MA: And how did it go? Were you able to grow the program? 

RG: I think I inherited one or two dozen ambassadors and with the help of the larger team, we grew to over 100 ambassadors with all different talents, interests, engagements, and abilities. As Mary’s Meals has grown, the needs and what we need our development team to do has grown as well. We still feel like we’re is a grassroots organization in that we don’t just need the million dollar donors, or big grants from foundations (although we are so grateful for them). We can’t exist without the $25 donors, and the donors who are putting on lemonade stands with their kids and telling their neighbors and co-workers about our mission. That’s at the heart of Mary’s Meals. 

MA: I love that. Do you have any “glory stories” that you could share with us? 

RG: So the state of Ohio, is a particular area that has been cultivated over the years and is proving to be very fertile ground for the message of Mary’s Meals. Through a connection from one of our ambassadors there, we had the opportunity to have our founder, Magnus, come speak at a local high school gala. Although a fundraiser for the school, the message that Magnus shared about Mary’s Meals really resonated with the attendees. Folks from that evening have been so generous with their time and treasure - spreading the work of Mary’s Meals to other schools, and communities. The growth from that event has been so significant to the point that we are now in touch with dozens of schools. We've hired a fulltime development officer in OH, and are now leaning into a regional model for growing our mission. 

MA: Truly grassroots! I love that. So What’s next for Mary’s Meals? 

RG: Mary’s Meals has had a few “years like no other”, as we all have. The same struggles that we’re all facing personally (inflation, cost of living etc.) is also what we’re up against at Mary’s Meals. Our expenses globally have increased about 40-50% primarily through the cost of food, fuel, and fertilizer over the last year. Unless we’re able to bridge the gap between these increased expenses, and our donations/revenue, we’ll need to take a pause on expanding our services. We’re not able to feed more kids at the moment—we are focused on feeding the kids we already have. 

So how do we get back to feeding more kids—that growth mindset, that dreaming mindset? We think that the way to do that is to expand our development team and lean into these different regions. That’s really at the core of the growth strategy - to grow a regional model. There are areas in the midwest that have tremendous support for Mary’s Meals. Hiring a major gift officer (which we just did) is huge for us. We have a three legged stool strategy the three vitals - grassroot efforts (regional model), major gifts, and grants and foundations. 

It may not sound super new or exciting but I don't think I want to be focusing on a new idea that no one’s ever heard of or tested. That’s not Mary’s Meals. It’s more about leaning into our core values and what has gotten us this far from 20 kids fed in 2002 to 2.5M kids fed in 2023. We’re still doing the same thing, we just want to do it faster. 

MA: Do you have goals of how many kids you want to feed each year? 

RG: Given the last few years of more global uncertainty we’ve moved away from sharing larger big numbers and instead have focused on feeding the next one child. Yes, 3M kids is a big beautiful number, but thinking smaller, thinking about the kids in the town next to the one we work in already—let’s think about those kids before we expand to another new country. Who are the children who are in the most remote places who are not being reached, let’s reach them first. The ones who don’t have any support. We can get caught up in these big numbers. We feed in 18 countries, 5K places of education. But it’s that one next child that we want to feed.

MA: Tell me about your new role as Director of Development. What are you looking forward to? 

RG: So with any industry, as you grow in your career it’s easy to get away from the actual on the ground work, but that’s not something that I want to happen! While I’ll certainly work with our ambassadors and take one off phone calls to talk to interested people, my main task is to work on the strategy of zooming out. Thinking bigger—not focusing on one church in one town, but on a strategy for all churches, not just one school but all the schools in the state or country. 

I love thinking big and working on the strategy for growing this mission. While I know this doesn’t rely solely on me, we all take our responsibilities for growing this mission very seriously due to the critical nature of the success of this mission. Kids and their families depend on this. 

MA: There is a lot of turnover within the non-profit space with employees now spending just 18 months at an organization on average. You’ve been at Mary’s Meals for 4 years—why have you stayed? 

RG: I’ve realized that the joy and purpose I’ve found in my work is more valuable to me than jumping around looking for fast growth. We try to keep our finances balanced at a 93/7 ratio—all of our admin expenses live in 7% of the revenue pie. We joke around about how everyone could go elsewhere and make a bigger paycheck fairly quickly, but being able to really believe in what we’re doing keeps us here. We’re doing good work, we have excellent leadership. And there is something about peace. You can’t quantify it. But when you wake up and want to do more for Mary’s Meals because of what they’ve done for you, that’s worth it.