Neighbors Feeding Neighbors
When business owners Mark and Lisa Hall found out that around 40,000 residents of Hamilton County experienced food insecurity, they wanted to find a way to help. They’ve been doing charity work for nearly 30 years, but in 2019 they founded the Feeding Team organization to combat hunger in their community.
Feeding Team partners with local food pantries and other local businesses to build and stock outdoor food pantries throughout Hamilton County and other parts of central Indiana. The pantries are always open and are completely anonymous, with no paperwork or identification needed.
“Our hearts have always been in doing something with food charity because we were in that spot, too. Back in 1985, we were a young married couple and had two daughters at the time. We were both working full time. We thought we had the world by the tail until we didn’t. In our case, it was a dentist bill and the transmission went out in our car,” Mark recalls.
“We didn’t know it, but we were what we called the ‘working poor.’ Today, they’re called ‘gap families.’ Supper, more times than I would care to admit, was a can of beef stew and a baked potato. We were both working, waiting to get paid and had to find a way to bridge the gap,” he continues.
Now, as the owners of TLX, or Talenting Logistics, they’re able to use their skills and resources to provide funding for the Feeding Team.
“As we’ve gotten older and gotten into a position where we can give back, we figured out that we’re pretty average. We thought that if we were that way, there’s probably a whole lot of people who are in the same boat,” Mark says.
They started with a data analytics approach, using a subset of the census to give them a “heat map” of gap families: those who make approximately $45,000 a year.
“The map just lit up. We really felt led to do something in Hamilton County, in our backyard,” he says. “If you ask the average person, Hamilton County’s got streets that are lined with gold, and the toilets are silver. I’m here to tell you that the face of hunger in this county looks just like us. We see it every single day. It’s not what people think.”
The pantries are designed with gap families in mind, and they’re located near where many of those families tend to live. Gap families make too much money to qualify for public assistance, and the Halls say many people don’t want to go to a church, or they’re embarrassed to ask for help.
“They don’t want to give out their ID or a utility bill or sign a bunch of papers just to get a bag of groceries,” Mark says. “If you say you’re hungry, we don’t care if you drive up in a Mercedes-Benz. Our mission is to have food for you anytime. It doesn’t always work, but the model is ‘take what you need, give what you can.’”
When researching a new location, Feeding Team consults local law enforcement for the best spot to place a pantry. Police have suggested not placing them inside neighborhoods, but just outside of them. Mark says some of their best-performing pantries are at tattoo parlors or government buildings like the health department. They are also located at schools, county fairgrounds, churches, businesses and parks.
Pantries have been built by different civic organizations and even several Eagle Scouts. Local businesses have also chipped in to help.
“Gaylor Electric has been a huge partner of ours from the beginning,” Lisa says.
The Feeding Team is about to launch a new pantry at the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. If that goes well, they want to put them at district offices all over the city.
“We have 78 pantries today and we’re headed toward 100. Our mission is to always have food available in every pantry,” Mark says.
As for the pantries themselves, the Halls got the idea from a friend who encountered a similar system at a church in Kentucky.
“The Feeding Team is a total rip-off of the Nazarene church; we plagiarized their idea and copied what they did. We put a funding source with it. We improved the strength of the pantry so it’s much sturdier. Our business, TLX, funds food, storage, transportation and materials for new pantries,” Mark says.
“We have two in-office pickup days with perishable items on the first and third Thursday of every month. On the second Saturday and fourth Tuesday of every month, Gleaners pulls up with their big semi and we pass out food. We’re feeding 200-225 families biweekly, which is about 24,000-25,000 meals a month between all of that,” Lisa says.
The Feeding Team accepts both food and monetary donations. Lisa says she’s been able to develop buying power with the organization and can double or triple any donations given, turning $100 into $300.
The Feeding Team has no paid employees and is run entirely by volunteers. They lost one of their volunteers to cancer recently. Working for the Feeding Team was so important to him that he arranged his chemo treatments around the times he volunteered.
“You can’t describe the satisfaction they get pouring themselves out, completely selflessly, to people who will never be able to pay them back,” Mark says.
“If you want to forget about your worries, go serve other people,” Lisa adds. “It’s people taking care of people. It doesn’t happen without the community. Neighbors taking care of neighbors. You see parents and grandparents teaching kids the value of generational giving. At the end of the day, these pantries are just big yellow boxes. It’s what you do with them. They become food sources. They become a source of joy and refuge when people take from them.”
To donate or find more information, visit feedingteam.org or check out their social media pages on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
