FAYETTEVILLE - When Denise Garner and her husband, Hershey, moved to Fayetteville 24 years ago, a newfound friend, Gladys Ball, introduced her around to the area’s nonprofits, hoping she would connect with one.
She connected with them all.
The Garners came here from Louisville, Ky., for his job as a founding physician at the former NARTI (Northwest Arkansas Radiation Therapy Institute, now Highlands Oncology Group). Denise Garner, who had been a nurse practitioner specializing in head and neck oncology, set about drumming up business for her husband.
Within his first six months at NARTI, he was treating 60 percent to 70 percent of the area’s cancer patients.
“She was so involved, so outgoing,” says Hershey Garner. “She’s the reason we’re on the radar.”
They took stock in their good fortune and began spreading it around. Their names are on a performance studio at the local National Public Radio station affiliate, KUAF-FM, 91.3, and they funded a series of author talks at the Fayetteville Public Library. They’re also funders of the fast-growing Fayetteville Roots Festival, a four-day urban music festival that highlights local farmers and culinary talent. Last year, people came from 27 states and as far away as Paris.
Her past and present nonprofit board positions are too numerous to mention, although they run from the northwest corner of the state to Little Rock and beyond. Social justice, health care, education, political and arts-related causes are her focus. In meetings, she’s authentic, genuine and kind - but direct when needed, observers say.
In 2011, she founded FeedFayetteville.org, whose mission is to feed a largely invisible population of hungry people by teaching them how to cook nutritious meals from locally grown produce. Then in 2012, she started FeedCommunities.org as the parent organization for Feed Fayetteville. Feed Communities seeks to duplicate the successful Fayetteville program in other cities.
“We want not only to provide healthy food to the hungry but also break the cycles that have created food insecurity and the health problems related to unhealthy eating,” Garner says.
Last year, Garner, 57, began publishing a new quarterly magazine, Edible Ozarkansas, which she hopes will someday support the overall nonprofit “Feed” group. Using a mostly volunteer staff, Edible Ozarkansas tells the stories of growers, artisans, vintners, food purveyors and taste-makers well-known across the region’s culinary scene.
Operations are housed in a former Nazarene church at 221 S. Locust Ave. in downtown Fayetteville. Garner’s vision for the 8,000-square-foot building - known as the Fayetteville Community Food Hub - is an urban agriculture resource center that serves as a gathering place for community meetings and training, as well as a teaching kitchen for cooking classes. Its on-site Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Garden, where people can use food stamps to buy food plants and seeds, and commercial kitchen provide a place for groups, families, gardeners and organizations to grow, share, prepare and preserve locally grown food.
Nonprofits have learned it’s good to have Garner at the table because she’s always looking for ways her nonprofit groups can help one another. She often wears her heart on her lapel, bearing pins for the many causes she supports, including a “HOPE” pin from President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, teal ribbon for mental-health awareness, an Episcopal shield and her Feed Fayetteville button that says, “Ask me how I can help Feed Fayetteville.”
“Denise really understands that Arkansas doesn’t get better unless we work on a bunch of different fronts,” says Angie Albright, vice chairman of the Feed Communities board. “If what you’re going after is quality of life, it’s never about one issue. She really gets that it’s about education, health care and hunger. All those things have to happen for there to be any progress.”
Rich Huddleston, executive director of Little Rock-based Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, describes her work as “far-reaching.”
“What sets her apart is that she doesn’t just work to provide charity to those in need,” Huddleston said. “She’s working to really address systemic issues that cause Arkansas families to live in poverty and for children to go hungry.”
People ask her all the time, “How do you do all that you do?”
“It all overlaps,” she says.
Her perpetually positive disposition and industrious nature are born of her upbringing.
“I have been blessed with many advantages in my life journey and feel a responsibility to share with those who may not have been as fortunate,” she says.
Her husband agrees.
“She’s gone from nursing patients to nursing our boys to now nurturing her community. It’s been a very natural progression, ” Hershey says.
RIGHT TIME, RIGHT BOAT
Denise grew up in Dallas; Hershey is from North Little Rock. They met at Baylor University when he was a senior and she was starting her nursing studies.
They shared a summer course in sailing and married after her freshman year.
“She was so much of what I wasn’t - sparky, popular and effervescent,” Hershey says of his wife of 37 years. “It was nice to be around where the action was happening and not have to participate.”
Says Denise: “We very much are yin and yang, proof that opposites attract. But it’s worked.”
Even today, at fundraisers and other social gatherings, she works the crowd while he watches. Hershey is approachable but reluctant to wade too far into the throng.
“It’s astounding to me how differently we react to the same environment,” Hershey says. “At any of those big social functions, she works the room, she enjoys it and gets energy from that. It is absolutely taxing to me.”
Depending on the time of year, they may be out every night of the week and have attended up to four events in one night. They used to have a secret signal that Hershey would give Denise when he was ready to leave. They’ve since acquiesced to taking two cars.
“It takes more than sending in a check to be involved,” Hershey says, though they are sponsors or co-hosts to the majority of events they attend. Over the years, they’ve entertained thousands of people at their uniquely decorated rock and glass home on an expansive wooded plot on Mission Boulevard. The pair are drawn to causes that are just getting off the ground and have stepped back from events benefiting the larger, more established nonprofits.
They estimate 90 percent of the dialogue between them is related to the causes they support, specifically education, homelessness and health care-related issues. Both their grown sons, Wes and Adam, are part of those discussions now, Denise says. Wes, the oldest by two years, is in his first year of medical school at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
The Garners’ wealth is lost on them, and they like it that way. Hershey says Denise has a lot of gifts “that she’s not comfortable with and does not recognize.”
They believe less is more - much more.
“We seem to be owned by our stuff rather than owning stuff,” Hershey says referring to people in general. He has suggested more than once that they sell their place east of town and carve out space for a small upstairs apartment at the Food Hub. They drive modest cars and Hershey wears blue jeans to every event, regardless of dress code.
HEAD AND NECK ABOVE THE REST
While in school in Texas, Hershey traveled between Dallas and Little Rock to work on Jim Guy Tucker’s successful run for Congress. The Garners eventually moved to Little Rock, where he received his law degree - and then a medical degree - with a year in between working as a lawyer for the Public Service Commission (he was instrumental in the decentralization of Southwestern Bell). She finished her nursing degree at UAMS.
Both are proud to have UA degrees. Hers took her to work in head and neck oncology for Dr. Kent Westbrook and Dr. James Suen at what would eventually become the cancer institute.
“Back then it was a trailer on campus in the parking lot,” she said of the institute. She followed the doctors when they started the Arkansas Cancer Research Center, now the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. The Garners are hosting the institute’s annual fundraising gala in September in Little Rock.
She said she learned a lot from the patients she tended.
“It was amazing to see their capacity for love, courage and endurance,” she says. “My hospice patients especially taught me the importance of loving people, not things.”
She still wears her old scrubs while hanging around the house.
Both their boys were born in Little Rock, and the family moved to Louisville, Ky., for Hershey to complete his residency in radiation oncology at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. Even before Hershey finished his residency, he was recruited back to Arkansas, specifically Northwest Arkansas.
John Phillips of Rogers, a patient of Denise’s through Suen, planted the seed with the Garners about NARTIand it grew. Hershey was the first physician to be contracted by NARTI.
When the Garners flew into Fayetteville’s Drake Field for their first visit to the area, it was the first time Denise had ever walked onto a tarmac to board a plane. They drove past cow pastures and chicken farms to get to a reception for them at NARTI, which was located on U.S. 412 west of Interstate 540.
“I thought, ‘What in the world has he brought me to?’” Denise recalls.
Everything they needed to know about the area they learned from a handful of helpful residents, including Gladys and E.J. Ball, Pat and Willard Walker and Lewis Epley.
“They were our parents when our parents weren’t here,” Denise says.
In addition to helping Hershey build his practice, Denise threw herself further into the boys’ activities.
From the time the boys were young, Denise strove mightily to make things equal between them, always making sure they had the same opportunities, often in matching smocked or appliqued outfits.
In October, Wes married Katy Carver, the daughter of a close friend of Denise’s, Lynn Carver, and a lawyer with Kutak Rock in Little Rock. Denise and Lynn had worked together as floor nurses at UAMS while their husbands were in various stages of their medical careers.
Once the Garners’ sons and the Carvers’ son, Evan, were born, the women found themselves next to each other on the sidelines at soccer games. They traveled to out-of-state tournaments on the weekends.
“Over the years, we’ve been there to commiserate and share good stories and worries about our kids,” Carver says of her relationship with Denise.
When they rejoined forces in Northwest Arkansas, they began to help each other with the nonprofit, political and charity campaigns each waged. Carver describes Garner as smart, yet self-deprecating.
“She’s personable. She pulls people together and makes them feel good about whatever it is they’re doing,” Carver says. “She just gets things done.” GRUMBLING TUMMIES
Garner’s idea for Feed Fayetteville sprouted from a staggering statistic released in 2010 by Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks that bills itself as the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity. The report said Arkansas led the country in child hunger and pegged Northwest Arkansas (Benton and Washington counties) as having the second-largest population of hungry children in the state behind Pulaski County.
Today, about one in three children in the area is considered “hungry,” she says.
“When I’m talking about being hungry, they don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” Garner explains. Because of varying cultural viewpoints, some people are reluctant to admit they can’t afford to take care of their families. Shame can lead to under-reporting.
Having owned two Fayetteville eateries, Brick House Kitchen and the BHK Kafe (both are now closed), Garner was familiar with the local culinary scene and knew the farmers who provided locally grown meats, produce and other ingredients. She tapped those connections to set up a network for food rescue and distribution.
She started pulling in key stakeholders from the community to gather feedback. It became evident that some services were being duplicated and that several organizations were reinventing the same successful programs.
“There’s a lot of competitiveness,” Garner says. “It’s difficult for people to understand that we’re not trying to take away their money or their publicity.
“We just want to get people fed,” she says.
Adrienne Shaunfield, executive director of Feed Fayetteville, says Garner doesn’t mind getting her hands dirty, often serving meals alongside volunteers. She takes out the trash, digs in the community garden and cleans the toilet.
“I’ve never known anybody who has been so wholehearted committed,” Shaunfield says.
On the horizon for Feed Fayetteville: a mobile food truck to take local grub to the people and the possibility of a master’s degree program in food justice at the UA this fall.
Like many of us, Garner says she struggles with practicing what she preaches. With that goal in mind, she presses on.
“I realize I’ll never be successful in achieving social justice, but as Mother Teresa said, ‘I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.’”SELF PORTRAIT Denise Garner
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Dec. 9, 1956, Dallas
FAVORITE CHILDHOOD MEMORY: summer road trips with the family
WHAT I LOVED ABOUT BEING A NURSE WAS getting to know the patients and their families and helping to make their experiences easier during a most trying time in their lives.
THE BOOKS I’LL PRESENT TO MY BOOK CLUB IN MARCH: Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty by Mark Winne, and Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All by Oran B.Hesterman
EVERY DAY I count my many blessings.
MY PET PEEVE ABOUT SOCIETY: I’m frustrated with a society that seems to value power and money over the welfare of all citizens.
PEOPLE MIGHT BE SHOCKED TO KNOW I was a rodeo barrel-racer!
MY FAVORITE ATTIRE? Whatever’s comfortable. No one would ever call me a fashionista.
I WANT MY BOYS TO REMEMBER that I loved them with all my heart and did the best I could.
THE ONE AWARD I’VE RECEIVED THAT MEANS THE MOST TO ME: “Favorite Mommy.”
MY HUSBAND SAYS I’m passionate about injustice, and that I want to fix it.
ONE GOAL I HAVEN’T ACHIEVED YET is practicing all that I preach.
A WORD TO SUM ME UP: fortunate
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the Garners' relationship with the Fayetteville Roots Festival. The error has been corrected.
High Profile, Pages 35 on 02/23/2014