(This article first appeared in the October print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Look at the daily workings of Henderson Christian Community Outreach and it’s easy to see that the organization is a well-oiled machine.
Monday through Friday, volunteers—there are more than 60 who can help on any given day—assist community members as they go through a grocery line set up. It starts with meat, milk and bread and then moves to produce and finishes with sweets. The shelves, says Executive Director Susan Smith, will always remain stocked.
Smith says that the maximum number of people the organization can help daily is 40—they go through the line one at a time—and the maximum amount of food per grocery cart is 100 pounds. That equates to 2 tons, which it frequently reaches, Smith said.
She told the Hendersonian on Sept. 25 that 40 people had come to the center at 509 Fifth St. before 9 a.m., the time they open the line to give out food. She said it’s been that way the past couple weeks, and it will be that way for a while.
Economic conditions the past several years have caused the typical client at the CCO to change, Smith said. Now, instead of the traditional homeless person or even those who couch surf, she’s seeing two working parents who pull in a paycheck but just can’t feed their children.
CCO accepts them all.
“If you are hungry and need food, come in and we’re going to feed you,” she said.
It’s another indicator that the face of poverty and hunger is changing. In the past, those who were hungry were trying to break out of generational poverty, she said. Now, she often sees situational poverty, as in they had one bad break, such as losing a job, and they haven’t been able to bounce back.
“You can get behind that 8-ball one time and not come out,” Smith said.
On average, CCO serves about 600 families per month, she said. Each client—a family or a single person—can come to the pantry one time per month.
The type and variety of food on the shelves vary, often based on what the CCO can buy from the Tri-State Food Bank, which sells food to CCO for “pennies on the dollar,” Smith said, while also accepting any donations that may come in.
Always on the shelves: milk, eggs, bread, cereal, peanut butter and jelly, Smith said.
CCO is able to buy from Tri-State Food Bank because it is a part of the Feeding America program; Tri-State serves 33 counties in western Kentucky, southern Illinois and southern Indiana. Last year, CCO bought 475,000 pounds of food from Tri-State, while it received 115,000 pounds in donations from individuals, businesses and churches for a total of 590,000 pounds, Smith said. Furthermore, since 2018, CCO has given out 1.85 million pounds of food to local residents, Smith said.
Running the pantry comes with surprises and challenges, often leaving Smith and vounteers with conundrums they need to solve. For instance, Smith said a stack of bananas up to the ceiling recently came from Walmart, another community partner that is a member of Feeding America that donates to CCO three times each week. (“They are very good to us,” Smith said.)
With a stack of bananas taller than a person, Smith said she reached out to other local food assistance providers and gave them away.
CCO will mark its 40th anniversary next year. Though it got going in 1983 after several local churches banded together to form one centralized organization to help feed the hungry, it was incorporated in 1986.
CCO has started two new initiatives to help even more. On the third Thursday of each month, CCO holds an afternoon pantry from 1-3 p.m. And later that evening, it holds another grab-and-go of loaded grocery bags. It’s set up for working parents who can’t get away from their jobs during the regular pantry hours of 9-10:45 a.m.
In 2021, the board started an investment campaign to build CCO its own building. At the end of that, the campaign had raised enough to buy the land on Fifth Street, have the building constructed and come out of it debt free, Lake said.
Being debt free with a new building allowed the organization to use what had been monthly rent payments for other expenses that help people, Lake said.
“You spend time here and quickly learn how special this place is,” said Dr. Patrick Lake, who is a member of CCO’s board.
The yearly budget is $325,000, with 40% of that used for administrative and salary costs, leaving the vast majority to feed people, Smith said.
“It’s more important we spend our budget on feeding people,” Smith said.
CCO has also provided rental and utility assistance, and Smith said the organization will continue to do that as long as it can. But if more people are hungry and the money used in those programs is needed to feed people, she won’t hesitate to use it that way.
“Our number one priority is to make sure the pantry is stocked,” Smith said. “Our heartbeat is the pantry.”
