Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Food For The Poor founder Mahfood led to help others
Relief charity gives aid to 17 countries in Latin America
Ferdinand “Ferdy” Mahfood was quick to quote Scripture, and his passion to follow what he believed Jesus would want of him became an international effort.
To make it all happen, Mahfood created Food For The Poor, a relief charity based in Coconut Creek, that has given billions of dollars in aid to the most desperate people in need.
In addition to being the founder, Mahfoodwas also the chief executive officer for the first 18 years, then followed by his brother Robin, who served in that role for the next 20 years.
Mahfood died Sunday, at age 85, at his Deerfield Beach home, according to the charity.
The cause of death was not immediately available. He had Parkinson’s disease, charity officials said.
Mahfood was born to a prosperous Lebanese-Jamaican family prominent in shipping and manufacturing, and went into the family business in Jamaica. By the mid-1970s he became a U.S. citizen and set up a company, Essex Exports, with Robin in Pompano Beach.
He said his life was changed in 1976 as he read an inspirational book, “Something More,” by the late Catherine Marshall, of Boynton Beach.
Mahfood told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1986 that God “came to me right out of the pages.”
“I am not doing what I do to be a philanthropist or a social worker; I am doing it because I think that’s what God wants me to do,” he said that year.
“When you give a $2, 20-pound bag of rice to person who is starving, it is like giving a house or a Mercedes to an American.”
Food For The Poor was established in 1982.
When Mahfood’s work was first beginning, his reaction to the tragic plight of the poor overseas was manifested in his own anger and frustration.
He’d return home unpleasant and upset, faulting his wife, Patty, and their three children for buying new clothes or two kinds of fruit at once, the family told the newspaper in 1986.
“We used to dread his coming home,” his wife told the Sun Sentinel that year. “He’d be impossible for the first few days. I think he changed when he started seeing some accomplishments.”
In 1986 he opened his first office in Haiti to guard against theft of the goods being sent there. By that time his staff of eight was working out of a warehouse, and Essex Exports paid for Food For The Poor’s overhead costs.
“We want the world to be a better place, [but] we can’t just hope and wish that it’s going to be better,” he told the Sun Sentinel in 1992. “As a businessman, I must make the world better if I want it to be better.”
Today, Food For The Poor gives aid to people in 17 countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, builds housing and completes water projects that provide both water and sanitation. Schools are repaired, and shipments of school furniture, books and educational supplies have arrived.
Sometimes the charity has strayed from its usual haunts, such as sending rice meals to Ukraine last year when Russia’s deadly invasion began, and to Turkey and Syria after February’s catastrophic earthquake.
“A lot of donors wanted to help because of those crises,” said President and CEO Ed Raine, and the charity had partners on the ground to make sure everything was properly delivered.
When Raine stepped into the CEO role three years ago, he visited Mahfood in his home to understand what made him tick, “why he was motivated.”
Raine learned Mahfood was driven by both his personal and religious conversion.
“He believed very strongly in transformation,” Raine said. “It wasn’t just handing things out, it was truly this idea you could help lift people out of poverty that drove him.
“Like any founder of a large organization there was something truly charismatic about him,” but it was his “deep love for the poor” that mattered.
“This is a guy who went into the slums,” Raine said.
“He wasn’t sitting in an office.”
Funeral arrangements are pending.