A Letter From Our President/CEO

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Feeding America national conference in Houston, TX. What a wonderful event. There were hundreds of Food Bankers together discussing the goal of not only feeding our friends and neighbors but addressing the root problem of why people are hungry and possible solutions. I had lots of takeaways but the main one is that we have a lot of work to do.

I think one of the first steps in this process is to identify who is hungry. We talk a lot about the one in four northwest Arkansans served by our partner pantries. Let’s take a few minutes and drill down into that number. Assuming there are 500,000 people in our service area (technically there are more, but the math is easier if we round down) then there are 125,000 people who are food insecure. But the question that I keep going over and over in my mind is “Who are those people?” Are they children? Are they seniors? Are they working poor? Are they unemployed yet looking for a job? Are they students struggling to get through college or trying to learn a trade skill? Are they black, white, Hispanic, Marshallese, Southeast Asian? Are they male? Are they female? Do they live in town? Do they live in the country? The sad fact of the matter is that I cannot answer with any confidence any of these questions. Sure, I can relate to my own informal research that comes from volunteering once a month at my church’s Food Pantry, but in order to attack this critical issue head on, we have to know who our end client is. To that end, I want to let you all know that I am researching ways that we can gather this information and promise to keep you apprised of my progress.

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A couple of months ago in this space I talked about forming an Agency Council, hopefully to begin meeting in April. That did not happen. However, I do want to announce a collaborative effort between the NWA Food Bank, Feed Communities and UAMS to host a day-long Health and Hunger conference on July 19 at the Jones Center in Springdale. Look for more details to come soon, but please try to block this day on your calendar.

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I am pleased to announce that we have added new staff members, Barbara Carter and Austin Harms. Barb, our Agency Relations Coordinator, will be responsible for working with our Agency Partners to help them grow their capacity to serve our common clients. Austin, our Community Programming Coordinator, will be working with our volunteers and developing some educational programming to help in our fight against hunger. Additionally we have filled a couple of open staff positions. Alysia Allison is our new receptionist and is the cheerful voice you hear on the phone when you call. Nathanial Porter is a new driver. The addition of these four staffers will allow all of our associates to focus on their individual areas of responsibility to help us find and distribute the food necessary to fulfil our mission of Nourishing NWA by feeding the hungry.

Speaking of feeding the hungry, our numbers indicate that through the first quarter of 2016 we (all of us working together) have distributed 53% more that the first quarter of 2015 and we are well on our way to surpassing the 10,000,000 pound mark for the year. As Elvis would have said “Thank ya, thank ya very much.”

Thanks for all you do each and every day to make northwest Arkansas a little bit better place to live and remember…. Because of you, someone ate today.

Kent