Antioch food pantry provides families with meals - Times Record

Antioch food pantry provides families with meals - Times Record

By Thomas Saccente Times Recordtsaccente@swtimes.com

For the past 16 years, the Antioch food pantry has been working to ensure that no family in the area goes without food. 

Charolette Tidwell, the executive director of Antioch Consolidated Association for Youth and Family, said the Antioch food pantry, located at 1122 N. 11th Street, is the largest food pantry in Sebastian County. It serves 5,500 people on a monthly basis, including long-term unemployed adults, working families and their children and grandparents caring for grandchildren. In addition, this number does not count the approximately 1,500 people fed each month via Antioch's mobile operations. 

Tidwell said the Antioch food pantry, along with the Antioch youth development services program, was the first aspect of Antioch to be created when the organization itself was founded in 2000. 

"My husband was a founder of the Lincoln Youth Service Center in Fort Smith," Tidwell said. "It was one of the things Lawrence Tidwell did, with children, with food, with seniors, with all of that. My husband died in 1997, and I was still working at that time ... and it was something I, growing up, had been just a part of, those aspects of food, children, the whole thing. In 2000, I decided, since I was retired, I needed something to do."  

Tidwell said the pantry is open from 2 to 4 p.m. However, working families are allowed to get their food in the morning if they have to go to work in the afternoon.

"Our hours are very flexible," Tidwell said. "Even though we say 2 to 4 in the afternoon, we're servicing out of the door every day. We're open every morning at 8 a.m. and we close whenever the job is done."

Each family is allowed to receive food from Antioch once per month, with a family of three or four eligible to receive an average of 60 pounds of food from all the necessary food groups to ensure a well-rounded diet. However, families with more members than three or four are eligible to receive more food, Tidwell said. 

Families are also able to secure food during the summer through the Antioch in the Park program, as well as other events that take place throughout the year. The most recent Antioch in the Park event took place Nov. 19. 

Tidwell said the food pantry acquires its food from a variety of sources. One of its more immediate sources is the River Valley Regional Food Bank. Ken Kupchick, the director of marketing and development for the River Valley Regional Food Bank, said Tidwell picks up food she orders from the food bank at least twice every week to keep the pantry stocked. The food bank also helps her in her endeavors when it can. 

"She pulls food into her pantry, (and) we also push food to her pantry in the sense that, when we have a large load of time-sensitive product, for example eggs or tomatoes or bananas ...  that type of product generally comes in truckload format, so we are in a hurry to get that product moved," Kupchick said. "So we will call Charolette and say, 'Can you accept a certain portion of this truckload that just came in?'" 

Tidwell always has her eye on nutrition when it comes to selecting food from the food bank, according to Kupchick, making the Antioch food pantry extremely valuable to the community. 

"In the world of donated foods, there's a wide variety of what we call SKUs, but the most expensive foods are the foods that are generally best for you, and are highly perishable: eggs, milk, cheese, oranges, things like that," Kupchick said. "The wonderful thing about what Charolette does is she's always a nurse and a food assistance provider second. ..." 

Kupchick said despite the fact that Tidwell gives food to people at no cost to them, maintaining the Antioch food pantry comes with significant overhead costs, including insurance, transportation, electricity and other necessities. 

"There's no such thing as a free lunch, even though her food is cheerfully given away," Kupchick said.