CUMAC’s two-story facility in Northern New Jersey has the look and feel of a standard food bank, with a warehouse, a handful of trucks, a client-choice pantry, and even a small garden.

In practice, the operation has a mission that goes much further than giving out food or even addressing the root causes of hunger. In the view of Executive Director Mark Dinglasan, problems related to food insecurity go back — way back — to childhood traumas and the harmful impacts they collectively have on the community.

More than most food bankers, Dinglasan is hyper-aware about things like neuroscience, epigenetics (having to do with changes to DNA) and adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. That knowledge, combined with his background in juvenile justice and as a lay missionary, gives him a distinctive take on what it means to run a hunger relief organization.

“We’re not in the business of running a warehouse,” he explained. “We’re in the business of helping people heal.”

The concept of trauma-informed hunger relief is not entirely new. San Francisco-based Leah’s Pantry, for example, specializes in providing training on trauma-informed nutrition programming, especially at the pantry level.

But CUMAC, which is likely the only food bank in the country to have a full page on its website devoted to ACEs, may stand alone in its clear-eyed goal of making ACEs its starting point for addressing food insecurity.

“Ending hunger has nothing to do with food,” Dinglasan said. “Our vision is building self-healing communities. That’s our call to action.”

At CUMAC, which had $4.6 million of revenues in 2019, helping people heal means addressing the biological harm that lives on in peoples’ bodies after they’ve experienced the toxic stress of childhood trauma. And the only way to do that, Dinglasan contends, is to surround individuals with healthy, resilient communities.

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