Mid-Ohio Food Collective CEO Matt Habash retires after 42 years

Matt Habash’s retirement after 42 years at Mid-Ohio Food Collective lands at the same moment the Eastland Prosperity Center is opening, a clean reminder that major hunger-relief systems often carry one leader’s imprint from expansion strategy to community trust. Mid-Ohio Food Collective said Habash’s exit will be followed by a board-led leadership transition, and it brought on Kittleman & Associates to run a national search for his successor.

The scale of the job helps explain why the transition matters. Mid-Ohio Food Collective says it serves more than 500,000 food-insecure Ohioans each year across 20 counties, and it distributed more than 73 million pounds of food in 2025. Habash’s departure closes not just a long tenure, but a leadership era that helped shape one of the region’s most visible anti-hunger institutions. His career also carried civic weight beyond the nonprofit sector. Habash served on Columbus City Council from 1993 to January 2007 and was council president from 1999 through 2006.

That combination of scale and longevity is where the workplace lesson becomes clear for A Simple Gesture and other food-recovery groups that rely on volunteers, neighborhood captains and staff with route-level knowledge. Long tenures can preserve donor confidence, community credibility and the kind of institutional memory that keeps pantry deliveries, volunteer recruitment and seasonal surges from slipping through the cracks. They can also leave organizations exposed if too much is concentrated in one person’s head. The National Council of Nonprofits says sustainability depends on smooth, thoughtful leadership transitions and preparation for unexpected departures, a standard that becomes more urgent when a respected executive exits after decades in place.

A Simple Gesture’s Greensboro chapter shows why that matters in a porch-pickup model. A Simple Gesture-Guilford County was established as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2015 and says its mission traces back to a 2011 template for door-to-door food collection. As of December 2025, it reported more than 8,000,000 child-size meals donated, $13,000,000 in donated food value, 75-plus pantry partners, 3,900-plus recurring food donors and 200 monthly volunteers. Its Green Bag program runs on monthly or bi-monthly pickups, while its food-recovery work depends on volunteer drivers who have a smartphone and a personal car.

The Greensboro chapter also says it has grown into a network spanning more than 70 chapters, a scale that makes succession planning more than a boardroom exercise. The chapter’s launch began in June 2015 after Bob Biggerstaff read a Wall Street Journal feature and brought the idea to Westminster Presbyterian Church, where 180 families took part in the first pickup. For organizations built on local relationships and repeat logistics, the next growth phase depends on whether those systems can outlast the people who first assembled them.