Rhonda Carol Sanders has a hunger for seeing families fed
It’s a raw memory for Rhonda Sanders, chief executive officer of the state’s largest food bank. After an initial event at Gardner Memorial United Methodist Church in North Little Rock, Arkansas Foodbank — working to meet the increase in food needs due to COVID-19-related job loss — conducted a large-scale distribution of food boxes April 28 at the Outlets of Little Rock.
This was the giveaway during which, as famously reported on the local news, the food was gone almost as soon as the event began.
“There were cars wrapped around the Outlet Mall; they were down the freeway,” Sanders says. “They were everywhere.
“I just wanted to pull out and say, ‘Somebody take me away because this is just horrible.’”
In particular, Sanders remembers one young mother in a red minivan who pulled up. When Sanders told her they’d run out of food, the woman began crying.
“There was just nothing that I could do. I got her some names of pantries in the area, told her some ways to try and help her find some food. It just broke my heart.”
Just as heartbreaking are the statistics on the Arkansas Foodbank website: 23.6% of Arkansas children have limited access to adequate food. One in five Arkansans struggles to provide food for their family. Arkansas ranks second in the nation for “very low food security.” More than 17% of Arkansans are facing hunger.
Some of these statistics were cited at a Dec. 10 “Food for the Holidays” telethon for Arkansas Foodbank, which took place on KARK, Channel 4.
The telethon, which raised $78,000, was just one aspect of the wave of media showcasing hunger in America … images dominated by drone’s-eye views of row upon row of cars lined up at drivethrough food box giveaways.
“In 2019 the Arkansas Foodbank distributed 30 million pounds of food,” Sanders says. The food bank has distributed 28 million pounds of food since March.
“We are actually up 33% over last year.”
According to those who know her, Sanders, who has been in the nonprofit business almost 30 years, is the perfect woman to be heading the food bank at such a critical time.
They were so “grateful to get her,” says longtime Arkansas Foodbank board member and current treasurer Trent Roberts. “I think we just really have been blessed with her. She brings a great passion to our mission.
“We do one thing, and we do it very well,” Roberts continues. “And she’s been a big part of that … She’s really taken us to the next level.”
One key reason for that: Sanders understands the problem the food bank is trying to resolve.
“Until you really dig into it and you hear people’s stories and you learn about [hunger], you don’t realize exactly what it is and what it looks like,” Sanders says.
It’s not necessarily a starving-children-in-India thing, she emphasizes.
“In the United States, we have a different type of hunger, and it is just as devastating. … Going to bed every night, not knowing if you’re going to be able to provide for your family, is a horrible way to have to live. A lot of our kids are maybe getting calories, but they’re not calories that are good for them.
“And … people move in and out of hunger.” Sanders remembers a friend from church telling her about a time she and her roommate had no money or food and had existed two weeks on canned biscuits donated to the church. She remembers her own family’s lean times, when dinner was Spam with fried potatoes. She remembers she and her husband losing their jobs shortly after their wedding, and family and friends stopping by with food.
“It’s a good picture of how all of us can be there, real quick.”
Perfect for the job Sanders, 61, had no idea growing up that she’d be doing what she’s doing now. She thought about teaching and considered becoming a physician. “I loved medicine,” she says. “I guess in general, I liked people.”
One of two children adopted by her parents, Sanders spent her first few years in the Pine Bluff area, where her father was a Baptist minister. She was in second grade when the family moved to the Glen Rose area in Saline County.
“But then the big change came.” Her father went back to school, then went into the Navy as a chaplain. Sanders, in sixth grade at the time, “became a military brat. On top of being a chaplain’s kid. On top of being a preacher’s kid.”
The family moved to California, where in 1977 Sanders graduated from high school in Los Alamitos. She made the choice to stay with her parents for an extra two years, and postpone her education, when they got a tour of duty to the Philippines. Once she returned stateside, Sanders enrolled in Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia and earned a degree in accounting. (In 2005, she earned a master’s degree somewhat related to medicine: public health.)
In 1983, just out of college, she first sold office equipment. She then took a job with the state Health Department, working on a community-based program developing child health plans for all the counties. The program was in partnership with Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, so Sanders got to know Amy Rossi, that agency’s executive director, who eventually hired her away from the Health Department.
“At the state, you do your job — ‘Yeah, this is my job; you do your job.’ You don’t mess over here at somebody else’s job,” Sanders says. “But when I went to Arkansas [Advocates], it was like, ‘Oh, I could do everything. There’s so many different things happening.’ … I just fell in love with it.” Sanders spent 14 years with Arkansas Advocates, working as director of health policy and legislative affairs.
Rossi happened to also be board president of the Arkansas Foodbank when Sanders was hired by the food bank. “I just consider her family,” says Rossi, who’s retired from the health-care industry. “I’ve … watched her expand her skills over the years.” Sanders, she adds, “can pack more into a day than most. I thought I was pretty good at it but don’t carry a candle to what she can pack into a day. Her leadership of the food bank has been just amazing.”
Sanders’ next stop after Arkansas Advocates was a big step up: She took the reins at the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance. “That’s when I found out about food.”
A hunger to serve
Sanders’ eyes had already begun to open to the needs children have and how those needs are all connected when those children are members of families who are struggling to make ends meet. Then, at the Relief Alliance, “I really was able to dig down and really learn even more about hunger in general — which was very eye-opening.” Sanders spent four years at the Hunger Relief Alliance before serving as director of the Arkansas Home Visiting Network in 2012, then coming to the Foodbank in 2013.
Then this year — which marked the beginning of Sanders’ eighth leading the food bank, as her seventh anniversary was April 1 — covid-19 struck, worsening an already bad food-insecurity situation in Arkansas.
“One day, you’re hearing about this thing, and then it’s coming, and the next day it’s Friday the 13th [of March], and they’ve closed all the schools and sent all the kids home … March 13 is the day that all of us kind of mark on the calendar and say, ‘OK, that was the day the light switch went off.’
“I remember very clearly us sitting down that day and I said, ‘Y’all, this is happening. This is gonna be a game-changer. We’ve got to be prepared for Monday morning, because you’re going to have all these kids at home, and they’re not gonna have anything to eat. We’ve got to be prepared.’ … We had to come back Monday with a new light switch — literally.”
And they did. “We started packing boxes and getting them to the schools so that they could get them home to families.
“Then we started talking, working with our [partner] agencies because we have 320 of them in 33 counties. And our first recognition was … a lot of them are going to close because they’re elderly, they’re run by those who are over 65.” Sure enough, representatives of a number of agencies called and notified the food bank that they were closing.
“So once again, we changed our model,” Sanders says. “We said ‘OK, instead of sending out pallets [of food] where they box it, we need to find a way to box it here.’” They then began reaching out and finding what they refer to as popup pantries … anybody in the community who would let the food bank deliver boxes to them.
“The other thing that we did is, we started doing mobile distributions … We did about 60 of them in 2019; we’ve done 620 of them in 2020.
“The other food banks in the state did similar things. … We all had to just kind of pivot and say, ‘OK, instead of us just being a flow-through to food … we’re going to have to be that production center.’” The food bank became such a center, using as many volunteers as could be used.
Tough times ahead
The food bank is seeing needs rise again as covid19 numbers skyrocket this holiday season, Sanders says.
“People are starting to get laid off again.” And, as Sanders mentioned during the Dec. 10 telethon, many of these people are first-time food pantry seekers who never thought they’d be in such a position.
“When we started with covid, I realized that we needed to make sure that we educated people on how to use the pantry system.” They have a number by which people can text their ZIP codes and get information on three pantries nearest them.
When getting to know Sanders during his time as the food bank’s board president, Pat Scherrey was impressed by her love of the people in the state and “just how close she was to the people of Arkansas’ needs.”
“What comes through loud and clear is that you know she’s really not there … as the CEO or to ‘lead’ the food bank as much as she is is to get everything out of the food bank that she can,” says Scherrey, who’s a retired representative for Kroger stores and is considered a board member emeritus. “And [she wants] to run it in a way that she can help more people in our state.
“She is a super talented lady [and] a strong leader, from every point of view.” Scherrey also notes how she’s always preparing the food bank for that future. “She spends a lot of time sending her staff members to other food banks to learn new and better ways” to take care of Arkansans, he says.
Sanders is also quick with praise for other organizations — pantries, churches, individuals — that are helping with hunger alleviation efforts.
“It takes everybody … everybody plays a part,” she says.
Committed to service
When not working with the food bank, Sanders is working for her longtime church, Antioch Missionary Baptist on Stagecoach Road in Little Rock. The Bryant resident just finished a 10-year stint on that city’s school board, of which she was president twice. As of Jan. 1, she will become a city council member.
Other than that, Sanders — who has been married to husband Rick for 31 years —is content to play with her 17-month-old grandson. In addition to her grown daughter, Sanders has a college-age son. “I feel very blessed. Very blessed,” she says.
And this recent winner of the Dick Goebel Public Service award at Feeding America’s National
Anti-Hunger Policy Conference wants those dealing with hunger to be blessed.
Anyone wanting to donate to the food bank can do so in three ways. They can give food — “We take most anything as long as it’s been refrigerated,” Sanders says. They can volunteer by helping do such tasks as sort food, bag produce and label cans. And they can give money. Every dollar can be turned into five meals.
So far, the community has done an “amazing” job stepping up, Sanders says. “We have had new donors. We’ve had old donors that have doubled up. We have also greatly, greatly benefited from being a part of Feeding America … They have raised money for us.
“And, our government has stepped up. They upped a lot of the programs that help us get food.” But Sanders still has some concerns about the agency’s ability to feed the hungry.
“The biggest need is going to be just really a week away because it’s the new year,” she says. “We’re hoping that people will continue to think about giving gifts after Dec. 25. Think about still giving gifts.”
For more information, visit arkansasfoodbank.org or call (501) 5658121.