Springfield-based Musgrave Foundation today gifted $120,000 to the Ozarks Food Harvest, which the organization plans to convert to more than $1 million in food for citizens in need.
Bart Brown is the president and CEO of Ozarks Food Harvest.
“Today the Musgrave Foundation, our long time partners, presented us with this check to share with all of our agencies,” Brown said. “And this is the third time the Musgrave Foundation has stepped forward in the past six years to do this, so about every other year they’ve presented a major gift to the pantries in our communities through Ozarks Food Harvest.”
Of the funds received today, OFH gifted between $2,500 and $21,500 to several food pantries in Christian, Greene and Webster counties.
“For every dollar donated a food pantry can leverage that to about $10 dollars’ worth of food at Ozarks
Food Harvest,” Brown said. “That’s how that $120,000 gets converted to $1.2 million worth of food; it’s just a tremendous leveraging the food bank provides to the agencies.”
The Musgrave Foundation gifts couldn’t come at a better time. According to Dan Prater, the director of Nonprofit Communication at Drury, there are 150,000 people living in southwest Missouri that are food insecure.
“These are people who aren’t sure where their next meal is going to come from,” Prater said. “And they’re also faced with this terrible dilemma of trying to decide whether to spend money on food or to pay the electric and keep the heat on or to pay doctor bills.”
Ozarks Food Harvest is the Feeding America food bank for southwest Missouri, serving 200 organizations across 23 area counties.
