Steve Thomson hasn't been idle since he retired 2 ½ years ago from his job as an engineer at Southwestern Energy.
He has been volunteering his time feeding needy people.
Once a week he goes into the new volunteer center at Arkansas Foodbank on Little Rock's 65th Street. He also spends one day every week at the food pantry at St. Andrew's Methodist Church in southwest Little Rock; at the Stewpot, which serves weekday meals at downtown's First Presbyterian Church; and at the meal program at the Clinton Presidential Center.
"I've seen upsets from natural disasters to medical disasters to infrastructure disasters," Thomson explains. "One element common to all is hunger."
At Arkansas Foodbank, Thomson shows up, signs in and takes on that day's task.
"Every week it's a different project," he says.
The nonprofit's backpack program, which provides a weekend's worth of food to needy youngsters who would normally get weekday meals at school, is the most consistent, but he also works packing meal boxes for senior citizens and packaging bulk shipments to other food-providing agencies, including those where he volunteers.
Sometimes, he says, "I pack it here, and unpack it there."
The packing takes place in a large space that made its debut last summer as part of the nonprofit's new volunteer center, which includes meeting places and a break room. Before that, Thomson recalls, "we were all crammed into the corner of a warehouse out back."
Sherri Jones, Arkansas Foodbank's annual giving director, says the kids in the program receive a backpack at the beginning of the school year and subsequently backpack kits go out in bags, which are then boxed up and sent to school districts for distribution to children in need. The schools then can "discreetly" put the food into a child's backpack on a Friday afternoon.
Thomson says the average kit includes some form of canned protein (often Vienna sausages and the like), packaged oatmeal, small containers of fruit, juice boxes and some chips. It's not elegant, but it's enough to tide a child over for a weekend.
"It's a finger in the dike, not a solution," he says.
The Arkansas Foodbank program is one of three organizations -- the others are Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas in Jonesboro and Southeast Missouri Food Bank in Sikeston, Mo. -- that will benefit from a team-up between John Deere dealer Greenway Equipment and country singer Jason Aldean to raffle off a John Deere Gator and zero-turn mower Aldean has used on his property near Nashville, Tenn.
This is the third year for the giveaway. Foodbank board member Lauren Waldrip explains that Greenway provides the equipment to Aldean, who uses it for a year and then raffles it off.
Jones says this is the first year to involve two pieces -- previously, "it was just the Gator" -- and that Aldean puts a plaque with an autograph on the equipment.
A virtual drawing will be April 9. The first person whose name is drawn can choose the Gator or the mower. The second gets the remaining piece of equipment. There's no purchase necessary, but for each entry they're requesting a $10 donation. Enter through April 8 at any of Greenway's 31 locations in Arkansas and southeast Missouri, text "GoBackpack" to 44321 or visit gogreenway.com.
The three food banks together feed 4,600 children through their backpack programs. Arkansas Foodbank reports serving 2,767 kids in 85 schools last year. The backpack kit, which costs about $6 per child, includes six meals -- a breakfast, lunch and dinner each for Saturday and Sunday -- plus two snacks per day. So far for the 2020-21 school year, they've issued 43,812 backpack kits, after sending home 98,670 in 2020.
The Arkansas Foodbank says the cost of one "backpack" of food for one child for an entire school year is $150. Jones says last year's Greenway-Aldean giveaway funded backpacks for 370 children.
Greenway CEO Marshall Stewart says in a news release: "[The fact is] 25% of our local kids are at risk of food insecurity. For many of these children, school meals may be their only source of food."
The federal Agriculture Department defines food insecurity as reflecting "household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food."
Thomson says neither he nor his two grown sons have personally experienced food insecurity, "but I cannot imagine what that panicked state is" for hungry kids or the parents who don't how they'll be able to feed them, in a country that has an overabundance of food.
"We over-consume, we over-serve," Thomson says. "But the country as a whole is undernourished."
