Ozarks Food Harvest is looking for people willing to sign up to volunteer to help meet the need for food assistance in the region. It’s launched the campaign, Resolved to Get Involved.
The goal of the campaign is to get community members to commit to volunteering six times between January and March. The organization hopes to recruit volunteers who will help provide 2,024 meals in 2024.
Ozarks Food Harvest spokesman Jordan Browning said there’s a huge need for volunteers right now.
"We typically have experienced a drop as we enter into the first quarter of the new year as we kind of exit that holiday season," he said. "And that's actually when we're still seeing demand, and that ties in with what we always say is that hunger is a 365-day-a-year issue, and we desperately need those volunteers to make sure that we can continue getting food out the door every single day."
Browning said the need for food assistance is greater now than it was during the peak of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
"When we were in the height of the pandemic, we were serving about 50,000 people each month," said Browning, "and now that has increased to more than 70,000 people each month that we're needing to serve, so we have to be able to meet that need of getting food out of our warehouse and into the hands of the community that needs it."
Ozarks Food Harvest is the Feeding America food bank for southwest Missouri, serving 270 faith-based and community charities across a third of Missouri. The Food Bank reaches 70,000 individuals monthly and provides more than 20 million meals annually.
Volunteers help with things like sorting food, sorting seeds, building Senior Food Boxes and assembling Weekend Backpack Program food bags.
Each volunteer shift is three hours, and there are currently 13 volunteer sessions offered each week at the O’Reilly Center for Hunger Relief and OFH’s partner gardens.
Find out more at ozarksfoodharvest.org/volunteer.
