It's a Wednesday afternoon at Weller Community Church in the northeast corner of Springfield. Volunteers from the neighborhood, the congregation and Missouri State University are abuzz preparing for their weekly food distribution.
Rachel West, with Springfield Community Gardens, said there are regularly 25 to 30 volunteers for the distribution, and they serve at least 115 families on a weekly basis.
“Having a community that comes together is the highest of value,” West explained. “Knowing that they're connecting with food, I think, is so very important. Sometimes in our hearts, we feel like we've lost a lot of humanity. And seeing a group of 30 neighbors come together just to disperse food for free to other humans, just because they deserve it because they're humans is a really beautiful thing.”
SCG helped organize this ongoing distribution in 2014. It also has a garden on the church’s property. They are one of hundreds of groups hosting food distributions across the Ozarks every week, helping to feed the one in six adults and one in five children in our region facing hunger.
Volunteers here arrive early, prepare crates and boxes into an assembly line and sort through donated produce and veggies from the garden. Most of what they’ll give out this day, though, arrives on a Springfield Community Gardens truck, loaded down with pallets of boxes from Ozarks Food Harvest.
“Ozarks Food Harvest gathers from all of our local grocery stores almost on a daily basis,” West explained.
It's produce stores can’t sell that otherwise would have gone to a landfill.
"It's pretty much whatever you see in your grocery store,” she said. “The same amount of produce that you if you walked into a Walmart Supercenter or a Hy-Vee. There's apples, there's oranges, there's bananas, there's pears, there's peaches. In season right now, we had a whole bunch of lettuce mix, pumpkins even.”
It would be costly for Ozarks Food Harvest, or anyone, to store this much produce in a cold facility. Logistics are key.
“We're able to deliver it the same day here to neighbors through the distribution,” West said as we spoke during a break in the action.
Volunteers at Weller will unload the truck, divide the contents into categories, like apples, greens or potatoes, then they will take turns filling boxes with a predetermined amount of each type of item. Families drive through to pick up a box, maybe another box if they are helping another family out. It all has to happen in a matter of an hour or two.
Cars line the street ahead of the distribution. It is a big deal for the 100+ families that pickup food at Weller every week, but it is a drop in the bucket in a metro area of nearly half-a-million people. While community volunteers meet needs on the ground, it takes a massive effort at the top to coordinate services for our entire region.
"With our retail pickup program,” Jordan Browning is director of communications for Ozarks Food Harvest explained. “We've seen that go from only collecting about 500,000 pounds a year to last year, I believe we collected more than 7 million pounds of that, just strictly from grocery stores. And I think that's a great education piece to those major distributors to see, hey, this food can have a second life and it can go to a family in need.”
Ozarks Food Harvest is the Feeding America food bank for Southwest Missouri, Browning explained, “so, what that means is we serve a 28-county service area made up of about 270 different charities. And our mission is to transform hunger into hope. And we do that by being a distribution center for all those agencies so that way all they have to worry about is, how are we going to get food and get that out to families in need, and we take care of the rest.”
The retail pickup program that diverts fresh produce to distributions like Weller’s saves about 400 truckloads worth of produce from the landfill each year, but it is just one of many programs Ozarks Food Harvest runs.
"We also do SNAP outreach assistance,” Browning said, “so that's helping people apply for the SNAP program to get additional benefits to spend on food dollars. So that way it takes some of that pressure off of local agencies. And then we also do our Weekend Backpack Program. And so that's specifically for those kiddos who are having free and reduced lunch during the week but may not have access to a dedicated meal on the weekends, so that can give them a breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday and Sunday. So that way they can come back to school on Monday happy, healthy and ready to learn.”
Those programs are all on top of the basic distribution of more traditional shelf-stable pantry goods to sites and organizations across the region. Browning said Ozarks Food Harvest is able to store, sort and distribute 15 trucks worth of food daily. They are logistics experts in the food insecurity non-profit world, and that also means working with their partners to solve problems. They issue grants to help their partners expand their capacity with trucks or storage, they host a web portal for sites to let them know what foods are in demand in their communities and, ultimately, they make sure food gets to people who need it, wherever they are.
“With our rural population, it's especially challenging sometimes to even find a site to distribute food out of,” Browning said. “You'll be going to a very rural part of the country and population size maybe 5,000, 10,000 into where it becomes challenging to be able to find somewhere on site for someone to handle that program and distribution or even have a building to house it. So, for example, with something like that we created the mobile food pantry program. And so that's a refrigerated truck to where we can go to a rural community. And all we have to find is an empty parking lot to be able to distribute directly to that population.”
Their broad, often rural service area poses challenges, but also opportunities, a chance to spread the wealth of urban cores like Springfield and make sure areas with less resources aren’t left behind.
“It can become especially difficult in a very rural community to even solicit funds from that community,” he explained “so we want to make sure that they're connected in to not only have access to distribution services from us, that we're delivering that food for free, but making sure that they can increase the amount of people they're serving without having to rely strictly on the resources within that community.”
Browning said Ozarks Food Harvest can leverage its resources to turn every $1 of donations into three meals. It requires scale and an army of volunteers to make that possible. It also requires knowing that hunger isn’t a monolith. Food insecurity is personal.
“The ballpark we're looking at for our service area is about 1 in 5 kids and 1 in 6 adults facing hunger,” he said. “And so, I think what gets missed with that food insecurity is it may not look like what most people imagine. So, a lot of the folks who are serving, they have jobs, they have homes, they're paying rent. Usually, they maybe have one or two kids in the household. They have a high school education. They just don't have enough to make it towards the end of the month. And that's where we're coming in to make sure that they can have food to supply to their families while they're trying to get back on their feet.”
And Browning said that need is growing.
"It's been a blessing that we've been able to distribute even more meals before, which we're very proud of. I mean, just in our last fiscal year, we distributed 21 million meals over our entire service area," he said. "But unfortunately, that communicates the increased need that we're seeing in our community.”