photograph by jon w. sparks
Sally Jones Heinz at MIFA. The plaque honors volunteers who lost their lives during Covid.
Editor’s Note: In January, Sally Jones Heinz announced that she would retire from her role at the helm of the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association (MIFA) this summer, after 15 years. Last month, MIFA named a new leader, Dorcas Young Griffin. Heinz’s last day is June 30th, and before her departure, we talked with her about what matters most.
In her 30s, Sally Jones Heinz was making a difference globally.
It wasn’t enough.
She was working in fundraising consulting around the world, but she didn’t feel fulfilled. “What became very clear to me,” she says, “was that I needed to be someplace that was local and had a mission of impacting the local community.”
photograph courtesy MIFA
For her, that meant working at her alma mater, Rhodes College, then at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, at Memphis Heritage as executive director, and eventually for MIFA.
“I have loved all of those places,” she says. “But I do have to say that MIFA is uniquely special. It’s why I have been here for almost 20 years.”
Heinz, the president and CEO of MIFA, announced in January that she’d be retiring in June. Her tenure there has been the fulfillment of what seems like her destiny, from growing up in a civic- and community-minded family to studying education, the arts, historic preservation, and human services.
Her father was Jameson Jones, a dean at Rhodes College and later president of Memphis College of Art. He instilled her love of learning and inspired her with his activism in civil rights. Her mother, Dorothy, was a volunteer at the food pantry at Evergreen Presbyterian Church and tutored elementary students, while teaching her daughter the virtues of loyalty and commitment. Her uncle was the Rev. Paul Tudor Jones, longtime pastor at Idlewild Presbyterian Church and also a civil rights advocate. He was instrumental in the development of what would become MIFA, and no small influence on young Sally.
Other programs reach different needs in different ways. MIPhone Buddy has volunteers making calls to homebound seniors, maybe just a check-in “how ya doing?”, maybe a birthday greeting, or maybe asking about the grandkids. Pet Food Deliveries delivers nutrition to companion animals, and in Long-Term Care Ombudsman, trained volunteers visit nursing homes and monitor conditions. There’s also the Claris Companion Tablets — easy-to-use tablet computers for seniors that let them stay in touch.
photograph courtesy MIFA
Volunteers load bags of groceries that will be delivered to needy families.
Heinz’s leadership has paved the way for innovations beyond the obvious. But her abilities to raise funds, keep volunteers engaged, and come up with fresh approaches for MIFA were put to the test when the Covid pandemic hit. Of course, it was a challenge for nearly everyone dealing with disruption in their lives, their businesses, their passions, their routines. But for Heinz, it was crucial that MIFA find ways to survive, since the recipients of its services were being hurt the worst.
At the beginning, nobody knew how severe the pandemic would be, how long it would last, and how communities would react. But, as Heinz notes, the guiding principles of the organization provided a solid starting point.
“For MIFA, our mission was just so clear: support vulnerable seniors and families in crisis. We had to keep feeding these folks depending on us, and really be prepared to help families who are going to be facing challenges,” she says. “So, our VP of meals said, ‘I’m going to go buy frozen food, whatever I can do.’ Our CFO said, ‘I’ll go to Best Buy and get some laptops. We’ve got to get everybody ready to do this.’ And our emergency assistance application was already online. We had to pivot.”
These were immediate and necessary responses, but MIFA had to figure out how to do things differently over time, and in the process, ended up expanding capacity. “We served more meals and we helped more families because the city gave us one of their emergency grants for $3.5 million,” Heinz says. “We had to get that out the door and we did it. But we also learned new ways of doing things so that we emerged a better organization: more innovative, more flexible and adaptable, and able to do things different ways.”
The Meals on Wheels program, which uses the largest number of volunteers, was affected instantly. “We had delivered hot meals five days a week,” she said. “With the loss of our volunteer army during Covid, we figured we could deliver hot meals two days a week and take three frozen or shelf-stable meals, or some variation of that. We had to get the same amount of meals to people, but have fewer delivery days and different logistics.”
photograph courtesy MIFA
Meals on Wheels delivers food directly to families in need.
Heinz figured that when the pandemic was over, people would want to go back to five hot meals a week. “But they were saying, ‘No, we like the three days and then we get this frozen and we can eat it when we want.’ Many have dialysis or doctor’s appointments or whatever, and this arrangement gives them flexibility.” And now, that’s how it’s done.
Another example of how Covid forced a better way of doing things was directly connected to people showing up to get help. They couldn’t do that in the height of the pandemic. “Families used to come to MIFA to apply for assistance. The waiting room would be full and they’d be there with kids and couldn’t get them to school,” Heinz says. “That’s the way it had always been done. But when everyone had to go online, we realized online was really a more dignified and better way. They didn’t have to come and sit and be seen asking for help.”
A byproduct of that meant the staff of social workers were missing the face-to-face encounters. But for the families, the pivot online made service more efficient, impactful, and quicker. Another benefit was that the team was spending more time on the phone than before, and that’s how the MIPhone Buddy came about.
There still were lingering issues that Heinz had to deal with, the most pressing of which was building back the army of volunteers. MIFA was and is a great collaborative, collective way to make a difference, but that was punctured in 2020. “Understandably,” she says, “people had said, ‘I can’t do that right now.’ Plus a lot of volunteers had retired.”
This is where MIFA’s engagement staff comes in. Heinz says that they’re out speaking to congregations, corporations, and clubs, recruiting volunteers. And those folks talk it up and get others involved.
And it’s largely because MIFA, with the leadership of Heinz, has nurtured the community to accept the importance of volunteering for something that makes a palpable difference in building the city.
But if it’s the completion of a chapter, it’s hardly the end of the book. Heinz reflects about the organization’s future: “When I say that I think MIFA is needed now more than ever, I don’t say that with despair,” she says. “Yes, senior hunger is a real challenge in our community and MIFA needs to be there to serve more, and working families have challenges with affordable housing. But MIFA’s interfaith — our vision of bringing people together — is needed now more than ever in our culture where people seem to want to dispute or be at odds.”
MIFA can be that place, she says, “where you may not agree on everything, but you can agree that helping a hungry senior is important.”
