Community Foundation of the Ozarks

CFO affiliates and their local food programs completed the Ozarks Million Dollar Hunger Challenge II this fall by raising $125,000 to match an equivalent challenge grant from the Walmart State Giving Foundation to Ozarks Food Harvest.

In all, 23 of the CFO’s 44 affiliates participated in the Hunger Challenge, which leverages the total of $250,000 at a 10:1 ratio of buying, transporting and distributing food through the OFH network of feeding programs and pantries.

The Walmart State Giving Foundation awarded a $125,000 grant to Ozarks Food Harvest for a second challenge opportunity earlier this year after last year’s success with a $100,000 grant for the original Ozarks Million Dollar Hunger Challenge.

In this year’s Ozarks Million Dollar Hunger Challenge II, 25 food programs across the region worked with the 23 CFO affiliates to raise matching funds by the end of September.

Grant presentations, shown in the gallery below, have been made with affiliate and food program leaders in a number of the communities over the past month. The participating affiliates were: Aurora, Bolivar, Cassville, DACO, Dallas, Dent, El Dorado Springs, Finley River, Houston, Jacks Fork, Lockwood, Marshfield, Monett, Mount Vernon, Mountain Grove, Neosho, Nixa, Oregon County, Seymour, Stockton, Southwest Missouri, Taney County and West Plains.

“We appreciate the cooperative spirit between our affiliate foundations and their local food pantries to jointly tackle this matching grant opportunity,” CFO President Brian Fogle said.

This program began in response to a national report  – “Hunger in America 2010” – describing the extent to which hunger plagues Ozarks communities. An estimated 155,000 Ozarkers face chronic hunger issues, according to the report.

“We are grateful for the funding from the Walmart State Giving Program which allows us to leverage hunger relief support to our local Ozarks communities,” said Bart Brown, CEO at Ozarks Food Harvest.

“There’s a growing population of clients who are not eligible for government assistance such as WIC or the National School Lunch Program. This ‘gap’ truly relies on our member pantries and feeding sites to help feed their families,” Brown said. “The current child food insecurity rate is sobering. More than a quarter of our children — five percent higher than the national rate — now face hunger, or do not know where their next meal is coming from.”

Ozarks Food Harvest is the Feeding America food bank for southwest Missouri, serving more than 300 hunger relief organizations across 28 Ozarks counties in addition to long-term relief sites in Joplin. The Food Bank reaches 20,000 individuals weekly and distributes one million pounds of food monthly. OFH was named the 2011 Small Business of the Year by the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce. Learn more at ozarksfoodharvest.org and at facebook.com/ozarksfoodharvest.

The work of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks and some of our partners and affiliates have been making news in southern Missouri and beyond in the last week or so. Here are a few of the prime examples:

• Seymour is FAMOUS! The Daily Yonder, an Austin, Texas-based blog that showers love on all things rural, picked up our story about the great work of the Greater Seymour Area Foundation, as well as the accompanying video by Brandon Goodwin. You can read the Yonder’s post here. It’s a wonderful showcase for one of the strongest communities around.

• Small Towns, Big Accomplishments. Education Week, a national education site, last week  featured not one but two interesting posts by Diette Courrege:

The first story was about the Center for Midwestern Initiatives, which grew out of our own Rural Schools Partnership and is being established in conjunction with the Rural School and Community Trust by former CFO president Gary Funk.

The second report was all about the unprecedented success of the aforementioned Rural Schools Partnership and the funds established and grants distributed for rural schools in southern Missouri.

Story of Seymour from CF Ozarks on Vimeo.

Dr. Ron Giedd likes to tell people how he and his wife, Joanne, moved to Seymour, Missouri, in 1992 after firing a dart at a United States map.

The story is pure malarkey, but coming from the usually disheveled and grinning Giedd, his eyes twinkling, you are almost ready to buy it. Giedd is one of our favorite things about Seymour, along with its wonderful local newspaper, the Webster County Citizen. He tries hard to be a “character,” but he is in reality an extremely intelligent and thoughtful retired physics professor from the University of Connecticut, who moved to this small Ozarks’ community of 2,000 because of nearby relatives.

Giedd and the Greater Seymour Area Foundation are an inspiration to every small community. That’s why Giedd, current GSAF President Janice Blankenship, and other board and community members  are featured  in a new video the CFO produced to show that, yes, philanthropy can be very successful even in  small communities that don’t have a lot of wealthy family or institutional benefactors.

People often tease Ron about the “Greater” adjective, asking him if the old rail stop Diggins, six miles to the west, is Seymour’s largest suburb.  However, the adjective Greater is appropriate—not for geography, but for effort.  Due to the tireless work of Giedd and his successor, Janice Blankenship, to educate and engage, the Greater Seymour Area Foundation has established 42 charitable funds, started a local arts council, initiated a family literacy program, renovated an historic building on the square, and accumulated total endowment assets of nearly $1.5 million—all of this in 13 years of existence, and in a working-class community with its share of rural poverty.  With planned giving commitments already in the pipeline, this grassroots community foundation will play a pivotal role in the future of Seymour and its surrounding neighborhoods.

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