McDowell family works to fill hunger gap with food pantry | News ... - Charleston Gazette-Mail

McDowell family works to fill hunger gap with food pantry | News ... - Charleston Gazette-Mail

KIMBALL — For years, Joel McKinney watched his parents give away anything they could to help the people around them.

Despite their shared DNA, Joel and his mother, Linda McKinney, hold competing ideas about how to help the families around them.

“We joke that you could give her $1 million, and she’d be broke the next day because she’d give it all away,” Joel McKinney laughed. “Now I would invest it, and hopefully turn it into more than $1 million.”

His mother’s selflessness, though, is a shared characteristic he and his girlfriend, Melissa Clark, believe resides in many of McDowell County’s citizens.

“The people here have such big hearts, they just give stuff away,” Clark said. “They’re so used to that, they don’t recognize the skills they have.”

Linda McKinney, operator of the Five Loaves and Two Fishes food pantry, doesn’t ask anything of the people who camp in her parking lot the night before food distributions each month. Joel McKinney wants to train them on agricultural business — his expertise — and teach them how to market themselves.

He watches the women who knit as they wait in line at the food pantry each month. When it’s their turn, they try to give away the scarves they just made.

“They sell themselves short, all the time. I tell them, ‘no, how much do you want for it,’ and you can tell, they don’t even think about asking for money. We need to help teach them business sense,” he said, “It’s about training — we have to train people, and we need to teach them how to best utilize skills they already have, and learn new ones. I understand why [Linda McKinney] does things the way she does, and I respect it, but it’s not sustainable. We have to think sustainable.”

Joel McKinney is afraid people in the county will find themselves where they did in January 2016, when the county’s Walmart closed, taking with it 140 jobs and more than 90,000 pounds of food that was donated to Linda McKinney’s pantry annually.

“They used to let us come by two or three days a week and take their produce, you know, whatever they had to get off the shelves,” Linda McKinney said. “When Walmart left us, they really left us. It hurt, but when that happens, you back up and find another route.”

A few miles past Five Loaves and Two Fishes, Walmart’s former building sits empty, as it has since 2016.

The sign in the parking lot is painted black and the outline of letters are still visible on the building’s face. Weeds grow through cracks in the pavement of the former garden center. Brown paper hangs inside the windows, making the interior of the building visible only in the places where the paper has folded and the tape has aged. Signs posted outside read, “All sales final 1/ 15 /16,” reminding anyone looking in of the store’s final days.

Today, the pantry gets most of its food from Operation Blessing, an international nonprofit dedicated to alleviating “human need” in communities. Members of the organization drive food up from Virginia to Kimball, where Joel McKinney meets them with a forklift and unloads deliveries into the pantry’s backroom — an open, cement-floored warehouse.

Public distribution occurs the third Saturday of each month, but the McKinneys take emergency calls from families every day, as needed.

Behind couches and children’s toys, pallets line the backroom with cases of bottled water, cans of soup, boxes of cereal and other non-perishables. Food with an extended shelf life — anything boxed or canned — often serves as the cornerstone for food pantries.

In a year, the pantry can provide food to more than half of McDowell County’s residents. Linda McKinney doesn’t take grants, and all employees are family members and volunteers. A month before Walmart closed, the family started a GoFundMe to help pay for a high tunnel to grow food.

“She was not very happy,” Joel McKinney said of his mother.

Linda McKinney laughed lightly.

“I’ve never had to ask anyone for anything like that,” she said.

While they hold different views, they are dedicated to helping those in McDowell solve whatever challenges come up.

“We realize, mostly, no one has any idea what to do or how to solve all the problems in the county,” Joel McKinney said. “That’s okay, but we have to make a start, we have to try something new.”