Anne's Anchor

[beej]

I went to a fund raiser last night for a place called Anne's Anchor. One of the most inspirational things that I have witnessed in a while!

It is a home for expectant homeless mothers. This small town in Missouri of about 3000 people, has come together to provide a home where expectant mothers can live, get support while going to school, working to get a job with a living wage and and become financially independent, with safety and security. They also get help with addictions. While living there, they are required to save half of their income. When they reach 500 in savings the local bank matches them, so that their savings is $1000. Which is what Dave Ramsey method of financial security calls the first step.

the best part of this fundraiser last night was listening to 4 of the women tell their stories. Unbelievable! One woman who escaped from a sex trafficker in St Louis, went from a drug induced prostitute is living in the home with 2 of her children. has gotten her GED, graduated from college and has just got a job to teach at the local Catholic School.

1000 people from this small town of 3000 showed up last night to donate money to this cause. Not only that, but these ladies become small town famous! The restaurants treat them with special honor. If they walk into a highschool basketball game, the crowd applauds, so amazing!

Right now they can house only 4 women, but the people of this town are getting ready to build another house, with over 60 women on a wait list.

It makes me wonder, how many other great stories like this must be out there, that never make the news.

[Brad St]

I wish there was an emoticon that would describe what you just shared as awesome. That to me is community, neighbors helping neighbors and working local. Just think if other towns were able to do something similar you might not have that large of a waiting list.

[Smit]

Nice story.

[mkd]

Wall to wall pussy, too
 We're any sandwiches made?😁

[Smit]

Wall to wall pussy, too
 We're any sandwiches made?😁

You ain't right man. 

[ghuns]

We have a place here in town called Cultivate Food Rescue.

They receive donations of food from various sources that would otherwise be wasted. Like if Notre Dame has a large event and overestimates their catering needs or a grocery chain has slow moving stock in stores and still has a large inventory in their warehouse.

They started off by taking this food and creating frozen packaged meals that they distributed through schools. The schools would give the backpacks to kids on Friday afternoons. The backpacks contain 6 meals. They are given to kids that the school knows, or at least suspects, wouldn't otherwise get fed until returning to school on Monday. As you can imagine, the stories of these kids are absolutely heartbreaking.

They started this up in 2017. They were quickly overwhelmed by demand for their service, as well as the supply of food that people wanted to donate. They would get calls from Kroger, Meijer, etc who would say, hey, you want a semi load of cabbage? Potatoes? Tomatoes? You name it. Their problem was that they couldn't make, package, freeze, and distribute all the food they were being offered before it spoiled.

They ended up building a 22,000sq/ft cold storage facility and are now providing their back packs to 1500 kids in three counties and providing food to almost 150 food pantries.

They do all this with only 14 fulltime and 6 part-time employees. The meals are all packaged by volunteers from the community. Churches, businesses, civic groups, you name it. One crazy unexpected source of volunteers is athletes from Notre Dame. The NIL fund for Notre Dame pays money to the school's athletes for their hours spent volunteering in the community. It's not unusual to see the whole ND women's basketball team there, or the lacrosse teams, etc. It's nice to see that at least some of those NIL dollars are trickling down to sports teams that aren't big money makers. The NIL fund also pays the charities just for having the athletes volunteer.

From 2017-2024 Cultivate distributed 10 million pounds of food. They expect to hit 20 million pounds by the end of this year.