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Good Food Is Good News In Arkansas

Laura pulled her flimsy jacket tighter. Who would have thought it would get this cold in Arkansas? Snowflakes swirled around her as she aimed her torn sneakers around slick ice patches. "Please, Lord," she prayed, "Help me get this job." Slipping her feet into dressy pumps, she stowed her wet sneakers behind a dumpster and headed into the office building.

Laura, her husband, Don, and their 12-year-old daughter, Allison, had moved to Little Rock a few weeks earlier from Dallas where they ran a property-management business. But they tired of the fast pace of big city life and made the decision to move back to Arkansas where Laura grew up. They counted on easily finding jobs, but a business recession and an unusually long spell of bitter weather slammed doors shut. For Allison's sake, they tried to keep a bright face on things, but Christmas had been pretty grim. Now all their savings were used up; they were selling blood to survive and, for the first time ever, they had to swallow their pride and go to a food pantry to get the fixings for a simple, hot meal.
That food pantry was Arkansas Rice Depot in Little Rock, begun in 1982 after an interfaith task force studying statewide hunger learned that Arkansas was near the bottom of the nation in food security. They learned that half of the families eligible for food stamps weren't getting them. Of these, about half didn't know about them, and the rest were too proud to accept them.

Neighbors Help Neighbors

Jerry Bedford, task-force chair, saw at once that both education and food distribution were needed immediately. "Our beginning idea was simple," Jerry says. "Arkansas grows lots of rice---why not use a local product to meet a local need? We bought brown rice---healthful, but not popular in the United States---from local rice producers and had it delivered to a central depot in Little Rock. We asked volunteers from churches around the state to pick it up and distribute it in their communities." It was a simple solution in the Arkansas tradition of neighbors helping neighbors through community action.

The idea worked. And caught on. Within a year, enthusiastic volunteers were measuring out brown rice from 25-pound bags into manageable three-pound bags to distribute to 60 food banks and church organizations in 51 Arkansas counties. Soon, local canneries were donating overrun and mislabeled items. Then, cereal and baby food producers began providing first-quality products. Perishable food poured in, necessitating the purchase of a huge, walk-in freezer. Arkansas Rice Depot was up and running.

Delicious and attractive, Simple Pleasures
products are available individually or in
gift baskets

From Subsistence to Sustainability

Laura Rhea knew none of this on that cold, wintry day when Jerry Bedford interviewed her for a receptionist's job at the global hunger organization for which he worked. But she did notice a little bag of rice on his desk with a tag that read "Happiness is when all God's children have food---Arkansas Rice Depot." She took it as a sign that her prayer would be answered. She was right; she got the receptionist job.

Within another year, though, Arkansas Rice Depot had grown so much that part-time staff and volunteers could no longer handle it alone. A full-time director was needed---someone who understood what it means to be hungry and had compassion for those whose health or life situation made it difficult for them to meet expenses. Jerry saw these qualities, plus management and public relations skills, in Laura. In 1984, she became chief executive of Arkansas Rice Depot.

As a leader, Laura lives by Isaiah 58:10: "If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday." Arkansas Rice Depot spreads light through a statewide program for disaster relief, a hunger referral hotline and church and community food pantries that distribute 4.5 million pounds of food a year. Laura says, "In 2000, we fed 73,630 households---182,148 people! That's nine percent of the state population, but statistics tell us it's only half the people who are hungry in Arkansas."

Who are these hungry people? Many are children, whose parents cannot or will not take care of them. Laura tells about the girl whose job it is to steal food for the younger children in the family. The hyperactive boy who sleeps in the shed without supper when his alcoholic mother can no longer put up with his pestering. The loving, single father of two preteen boys who lost his job when the factory where he worked closed. Their food money went to fix his old car, so he could look for work.

The Struggle for Survival

Drawing on her own family's experience, Laura understands that hungry children can't wait for long-term solutions; they need immediate nourishment if they are to grow into healthy adults. Yet some Arkansas children eat nothing but a school lunch on weekdays and nothing at all on weekends. Holidays are a nightmare for these kids. So Arkansas Rice Depot locates some of its food pantries in public schools, where observant teachers, school nurses and counselors can hand out nutritious snacks like peanut butter, cheese and fruit to children too hungry to learn.

In 1996, Allison Rhea Stroud---now grown up with a Bachelor of Science degree in social psychology---developed a new program called Food for Kids for those children who go hungry after school. This provides schools with backpacks of kid-friendly food, like ring-top cans of spaghetti, pudding and juice, for children to take home and eat on weekends or holidays, sometimes without their parents' knowledge. "Today we serve 8,000 children," she says.

School administrators testify to the difference Arkansas Rice Depot is making. One wrote,
I put one of my boys on Food for Kids, and he started to show me what he could do. In five years in this district, this boy did marginal work and got marginal grades. He seldom smiled and often hid his face in his shabby jacket. Last spring he took the state test with his classmates. When he got his test back, I was in shock. This boy had one of the top math scores in his class. His SAT9 doubled. He went from 38 to 76. Now, in his shabby coat, he smiles. He holds his head up, and he knows. I believe you all need to know what you have given him. God bless you!

Now school administrators are asking Arkansas Rice Depot to help meet another need: keeping pregnant teens and new mothers in school. To cut costs, many of these young women skimp on food and usually end up dropping out. Arkansas Rice Depot's creative response is Packs and Pouches; the Pregnancy Pack will have appropriate, easy-to-eat foods and nutrition information and the Mama Pouch will be stuffed with baby clothes and supplies. Arkansas Presbytery PW circles are ready to help fill these special backpacks, but first, a daunting $180,000 must be raised for a storage warehouse and a delivery van.

Laura fills a backpack for
a hungry schoolchild in the
Food for Kids Program.

PW---Structured to Serve

Arkansans are among the nation's poorest citizens, but, according to Nonprofit Times, they rank among the country's most generous. Kids help kids through the annual "Great Arkansas Penny Hunt," in which school classes compete to see who can collect the most pennies. Little Rock businesses provide pizza and other prizes for the top performers. Adults---many of them PW groups---assemble Simple Pleasures baskets filled with rice mixes and other treats for volunteers like Betty Jean Moore to sell at church mission fairs and alternative markets in greater Little Rock. From 1983--1988, Betty Jean was a member of the team that created the design for the new Presbyterian Women organization. Its central thrust was to challenge women to seek their unique ministry in their congregation and structure themselves to accomplish that mission. Now, with the help of her retired Presbyterian minister husband, Park, Betty Jean is doing just that.

Laura says Arkansas Rice Depot couldn't survive without PW and community volunteers. "According to Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, Arkansas still ranks sixth in the nation for food insecurity. That means that 12.6 percent of Arkansas households don't have enough safe, nutritious food for an active, healthy life. After September 11, we saw money donations slow down to a trickle and food donations were down by two-thirds. Our freezer is full again now, but it was completely empty for a while. So we gave the floor a thorough wash and wax-something that's hard to do when
it's stacked to the ceiling with food!" She adds, " Last year, the fall Penny Hunt did not raise the money we hoped, but how thrilled we were that so many schools agreed to collect pennies for us in spite of the fact that many of them had just completed collections for victims of the 9/11 attack."

Last December, Laura had an experience that brought back memories of her first winter in Arkansas. One congregation called to tell her they were bringing her a "White Christmas." She says, "A convoy of cars, trucks and vans pulled into our parking lot. We looked for snow, but saw instead hundreds of large, white paper sacks. Everyone in the congregation had filled one up with nonperishable foods, ready to deliver to those in need!"

She concludes, "In spite of all the challenges, with the help of folks like these, we are committed to giving our very best efforts to provide food to the 300 food pantries and 253 Food for Kids programs we sponsor. The hungry, and the Lord we serve, deserve no less."

Anna H. Bedford is former associate editor of Horizons and serves as a PW Bible study moderator at First Presbyterian Church, Little Rock, Arkansas.

To find out more about Arkansas Rice Depot, visit www.ricedepot.org, or email Laura Rhea at endhunger@ricedepot.org.

Read some of their stories, what PW has done to remedy the situation, and what you can do to help. Order Horizons today.

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