Anurag Jain on the Importance of Leaving a Legacy
Why the NTFB’s chair emeritus spends his time helping solve the world’s most complex problems, including hunger relief.
I arrived in the U.S. from Chennai, India more than 25 years ago to pursue an MBA at the University of Michigan and knew I would be writing my story here, even if I didn’t yet know what all it would entail.
My family has seen hunger not even a generation ago as my dad was 20 pounds underweight when he came to work in the United States, so I knew hunger relief would be important to me as I considered my legacy.
A legacy captures your life and the lessons learned along the way, or it celebrates things that were most important to you, whether a cause or interest.
For me, legacy is a framework to be given to future generations. Remember, a legacy is not a statistic, but rather a living body of work. It requires considering how things like kindness, ethics and character will impact your decisions when making material wealth. And it means determining how much time and money you will spend on helping others while living your day-to-day life.
My mother and father always taught us that if you have “X,” a certain part of “X” goes to the community. You just had to factor that into your life, and it is important to me to build on that legacy.
Just as my parents taught me, we need to be intentional about what we are teaching our children because instilling legacy into future generations is paramount. Children are like sponges and if you don’t teach them, they will only glean information from their environment.
The North Texas Food Bank has done incredible work in their mission to create a hunger-free North Texas. They have nearly quadrupled the food distributed, providing access to 144 million meals in the last fiscal year—the most ever in the NTFB’s history and a 5% increase from the previous year. They’ve also made their operations and systems better in many ways, but we must do more as the need has also grown.
When I got involved with the board, I wanted to contribute as a thought leader and problem solver. That meant talking with NTFB President and CEO Trisha Cunningham about what needs they had. She mentioned in one conversation that IT was an area they had targeted for improvement, and that is something I was able to help with, connecting the Food Bank to a prominent company for a third-party assessment, which became the basis of NTFB’s IT strategy.
During the pandemic, NTFB needed volunteers because companies were sending employees home to work remotely. I had invested in a technology solution called ShiftSmart that I thought could help. We turned the platform into an initiative called Get Shift Done and allowed for unemployed hospitality workers to get paid – thanks to support from the Communities Foundation — for replacing NTFB’s regular volunteer workforce.
We are living in an incredible time. I have never seen more innovation and innovative entrepreneurs at any other time, whether it be in the for-profit world or through initiatives aimed at solving the most complex problems of our time, like hunger relief.
More work is needed, and I would like to make a more significant dent in hunger relief. It is a complex problem that will require the best minds coming together. But let’s be clear, it also requires a lot of resources, including money. I would like to help make that difference.
And in the years to come, I hope that the next generation will be inspired to spend time on taking care of the less fortunate more than my generation ever could.
Anurag Jain is a past NTFB Board Chair, and he continues to serve NTFB as Chair Emeritus and as a Lifetime Board Member. He is also chairman and CEO of Access Healthcare and co-founder/managing partner of Perot Jain.
To learn more about leaving a legacy through planned giving, please visit ntfb.org/planned-giving.