Highlands United Methodist Church teams up with Samaritan Community Center to fight hunger

In Arkansas, 549,070 people are struggling with hunger – and of them 176,710 are children. Highlands United Methodist Church of Bella Vista and Samaritan Community Center of Rogers are teaming together to help alleviate this very real problem in Northwest Arkansas. Steve and Amy Terry have been members of the Highlands United Methodist Church congregation for two years. In that time, they have helped improve upon an already existing snack pack program the church had been utilizing to help with the hunger problems in Northwest Arkansas.

“It was a program that we already had in the church and we had done it a lot differently,” stated Steve Terry. “Through our work with the Samaritan Community Center we changed the program up a little bit to make it work better. We initially were packing all of the snack packs at the church. Samaritan Community Center is so well set up with assembly lines they use to package the food. They also have the inventory and the distribution system to get it to the schools.”

A Samaritan Community Center SnackPack is a small white plastic shopping bag filled with eight healthy snacks. They are given to qualifying school children on Fridays to take home to ensure they have something to eat on weekends. SnackPacks usually contain (items may vary, depending on donations) two single-serve cereal bowls (cold cereal only), macaroni and cheese single bowls or pouches, Slim Jim-type meat sticks, 1 percent shelf stable milk, fruit strip, and animal crackers. Because of the number of school children with peanut allergies, SnackPacks for Kids is a peanut free program. SnackPacks for Kids is open to schools, from head starts to high schools, in Benton, Washington, Madison and Carroll counties in Arkansas.

Between 3,500 to 5,500 children in 170 Northwest Arkansas schools and head start centers receive a SnackPack every Friday during the calendar school year. During the summer, approximately 2,000 to 3,000 SnackPacks are distributed through summer school lunch programs, church lunch programs, Samaritan Community Center cafes and other public venues. “All of the labor to package the snack packs is donated by local churches, including Highlands United Methodist Church,” noted Terry. “We have about 10 people that help pack on the third Tuesday of every month. We pack together with the Community Church of Bella Vista.” Highlands United Methodist Church totally supports all of the SnackPacks that go to Gravette schools and do all packaging for these SnackPacks. “Last year, we produced about 7,000 snack packs for Gravette schools,” added Terry.

“The neat thing that the Samaritan Center has done, is that they went in and had the school counselors qualify who gets the snack packs,” said Terry. “This program is for students who have insufficient food through the weekend.

It’s amazing how many students go to school on Mondays hungry – they basically have to be fed before they can settle down enough to study. This helps with that.”

Steven and Amy Terry have lived in the Bella Vista area for two years and hope to continue to help fight hunger in Northwest Arkansas through their work with Highlands United Methodist Church, of Bella Vista, and the Samaritan Community Center.

Steve and Amy Terry