Caroline Weiss
caroline.spears@baxterbulletin.com
Families facing difficult circumstances in Baxter County will soon have a clearer path to services and support that can help them regain stability and work toward long-term independence.
The newly established Baxter County Chapter of the 10:33 Initiative, supported by the Food Bank of North Central Arkansas (FBNCA), was launched by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last year and is designed to strengthen connections between families in need and the resources that already exist throughout the community.
The effort, named so after the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:33), brings nonprofits, businesses, churches, schools, health care providers, government agencies and other local organizations together in a coordinated network aimed at helping families move beyond immediate crisis, achieve greater stability and ultimately pursue meaningful employment and careers.
“At the Food Bank in North Central Arkansas, we believe in communities working together to solve their own problems,” explained FBNCA CEO Jeff Quick at a meeting held Tuesday afternoon with community leaders and FBNCA supporters. “We recognize that it is our responsibility as the Food Bank to make sure that we can provide food for the tables of our neighbors in need. We also recognize the part of our role in the community is to be able to set tables where community leaders can come together and advocate and work on behalf of the neighbors we all serve.”
He added that for the third year, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has rated Arkansas’s having the highest rate of food insecurity in the nation per capita. It further showed, he explained, that in Baxter County alone, childhood hunger or childhood food insecurity has risen by 6.6 percent over the previous year.
“Now, across our nine-county service area here in northcentral Arkansas, we know that there’s about 13,000 children who are food insecure,” he explained. “And just for perspective, that’s roughly and approximately the population of either Mountain Home or Harrison. When it comes to kids, those are numbers that we don’t want to be seeing. So, those are some of the reasons we’re so excited about being able to serve as the organization for the 10:33 Initiative here in Baxter County.
“Working to help our neighbors move from crisis to career, while providing a multitude of services and resources, with the dignity and respect that we all deserve,” he continued. “We see this as an extension and the work that we’ve been engaged in for over a decade. We’ve referred to that work as our “Move Up” initiative here at the Food Bank, and in that initiative, we’ve seen over 11,000 graduates through our programs of education and cooking and shopping and live skills.”
He said they began as collaborative work with Arkansas State University Mountain Home in about 2009 and since then, a lot of community partners have already been gathering at round tables, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, for a poverty consortium.
“Our goal in that work was to be able to look at all the different programs that were happening across the nation and identify a program that would work best for Baxter County and for the surrounding area,” he explained. “So, what we landed on was the body of work, Bridges Out of Poverty. The Rockefeller Foundation Grant with the Food Bank became a fiscal agent for that grant after the ASU asked us to take the lead on that, and we did.”
He explained however that when the grants ended, they continued the work with the “Move Up” initiative.
“Over the past 12 months, we’ve been engaged with ‘Restore Hope’ and a collection of non-profits in the community to learn more about the 10:33 Initiative, ‘Restore Hope,’ and the ‘100 Families’ Initiative across the state and throughout the nation,” Quick explained. “This summer, our board of directors agreed with the support of a collection of nonprofit organizations that we were working with in this learning time to become the organization for the 10:33 initiative in Baxter County.”
He concluded that he hoped all those in attendance would get excited about the efforts being made to not only reduce the amount of time that community members in need spend going from agency to agency looking for assistance, but also the vision of providing a holistic approach to the care that is being offered to their neighbors to get them the resources they need.
At that point, Quick gave the microphone to Mayor Hillrey Adams to speak on the partnership of the city and community leaders in support of FBNCA and its missions over the years.
“I think one of the easiest things that I learned early on as mayor is that if you needed help, call the Food Bank,” he said.
He recounted how the Food Bank was invaluable with their efforts and support in helping the victims of the Briarcliff tornado of 2024, where they organized stations for people to get food and resources while trying to pick up the pieces of their lives.
“One of the first groups we reached out to to try and get some help besides the Red Cross was the Food Bank,” Adams stated. “They organized places for people to go pick up food, and the ASU men’s basketball team came up here, and we put them to work packing food and sent them out to distribute it.”
Adams recounted more ways FBNCA assisted with various needs in the community, and then he passed the microphone to special guest Paul Chapman, Restore Hope Arkansas director, a nonprofit based out of Little Rock that began as a program to assist families after incarceration. He spoke on the rollout of the 10:33 initiative and gave a presentation on the website and how it is designed to connect various leaders, professionals and others who wanted to get involved with the program.
“Here are the three things that I found in partnership with the State Department of Corrections,” Chapman explained. “People who are in complex situations cross organizational boundaries and nonprofit agency boundaries, but the support systems that are out there are not set up to cross boundaries. We really depend on that person to find us with either word of mouth or us going to places telling them what we offer.”
He explained one of the reasons why they have such poor outcomes and things like recidivism or reunification with a child in foster care is because the people in those situations have many things occurring in their lives, and they have difficult times gaining access to the right people who can provide the right service at the right time.
So that is what inspired him to be a part of this movement, and he is dedicated to going forward to educate as many people as possible on how to use the 10:33 Initiative and its platform to reach these people in need.
To learn more or to get involved with this initiative, visit https://governor.arkansas.gov/interact/faith-based-initiatives/1033-initiative
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