222: When food is just the beginning with Jenny Hartung

We’re back again today with our Warm Hearts, Warm Homes series, and this time, exploring how food assistance helps create warm, stable homes for our neighbors in need.

Food insecurity is a big problem in the United States, as 47 million people—including 14 million children—do not have enough to eat and don’t know where their next meal will come from.

Beyond that figure, many more people—estimated in the millions by Feeding America—do not meet the government’s definition of food insecure but still turn to the charitable sector for support.

And in Gillette, Wyoming, that includes The Salvation Army.

Jenny Hartung, who leads The Salvation Army’s Service Extension Unit in Gillette, has witnessed the evolution of need and Salvation Army assistance over the past decade. What started as a single shelf of emergency food has grown into a 15,000-square-foot facility that’s warming both hearts and homes through food assistance, social services, and soon, a bridge housing program for women.

Today, Jenny is here to share how The Salvation Army in this small town of some 30,000 people is making a big impact—distributing over 2,000 food boxes every month and showing us all what’s possible when a community comes together to care for its neighbors.

Show highlights include:

• What the town of Gillette, Wyoming, is like. 
• The early days of the Service Extension Unit in Gillette.
• How providing food connects to the goal to keep families warm in Wyoming winters.
• What the level of food assistance tells us about the need in Gillette.
• A story of one family’s transformation, starting with food.
• How the community supports the work here.
• How services adapt to meet changing needs throughout the year.
• Vision for the future. 
• Why Jenny is invested in this work.
• What is giving her hope now. 

Listen and subscribe to the Do Gooders Podcast now. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Jenny Hartung: I’m Jenny Hartung and I’m the director of The Salvation Army Service Extension in Gillette, Wyoming.

Christin Thieme: What is Gillette like for anybody who’s never been there? Paint the picture for us of Gillette.

Jenny Hartung: Gillette is an oasis in a desert. So most of Wyoming is a high desert. And what isn’t a high desert are beautiful, fabulous mountains. We, however, are not in the beautiful, fabulous mountains. We are on the plains and the wind blows all the time, and it’s quite cold here, six to eight months a year. We have snow in eight months every year. So if the air temperature say is minus 20, with the wind, it might be minus 50. So it’s quite cold here out on the plains. And in the summertime, it gets between 90 and maybe 100, 102 in the summertime. So it’s very extremes. It’s a land of extremes. We’re known for our energy production. We have the largest amount of coal being shipped throughout the United States and some overseas of any state in the union as well as oil and gas production. So it’s an economy based on fossil fuels.

Christin Thieme: And the service extension there as part of The Salvation Army. Give us a little preview of what you do. What is the work of service extension?

Jenny Hartung: Absolutely. So by design, service extensions, service rural communities with social services and pastoral care as needed, there are 36 churches in this tiny little 30,000 member town. So Salvation Army doesn’t have a core here, but we are representative of God’s love here in the community by sharing what we have, including emergency rent, utilities, homeless prevention, and a super robust food pantry.

Christin Thieme: And your unit has witnessed quite the evolution in the past decade or so. Can you take us back to that one room office in, I believe it was the bank basement? What did those early days look like for service extension there?

Jenny Hartung: It was a long time ago. So I started with the Army. I just looked, it looks like it’s 11 years ago now. And when I took over, the office had been shuttered for six months. The gal before me had had to leave because of a serious family situation, and the army hadn’t been able to find somebody that was the right fit out here in the middle of nowhere. I very luckily tripped upon the advertisement and applied. I went down to Denver and I was basically hired while I was driving home, so it was fantastic. The first day I showed up for work, I had never been to the office or anything like that. I literally answered the ad off of Indeed. And I went in and it’s just a one room office. It was tiny. It was maybe 300 square feet tops. There was a little waiting room in an office. I was the sole staff and we served people with rent and utilities and gas vouchers. So that was the beginning.

The annual budget I think was maybe 110,000, very, very small, including my salary. So we were a very small footprint in a community that was really going through hard times. When the coal, oil and gas layoff people in this town, it affects not only them, but of course the rest of their family. Average family size in Gillette is 3.1 people. So it’s for the 600 layoffs for example, that happened on July 1st, 2018. One of the coal mines shuttered its doors and never did open again. Those 600 workers represented 18 or 1900 people and they suddenly had no income, no health insurance, no food, nothing. They got zero paycheck. So that’s an example of the need that’s here in the community, but that was a couple of years later.

When I took over the position, it was lonely in that office and it also wasn’t very safe, because I had people that were very desperate and needed things immediately, and perhaps we couldn’t help them immediately. Perhaps it was going to take us a little time.

One example, a guy came in and he seemed to be very drunk and he asked for a gas voucher. Of course, in good conscience, there’s no way you’re going to give a gas voucher to a drunk guy for his own safety as well as public safety. I made a deal with him. I said, “I tell you what, if you can show up in the morning sober, I’ll give you a gas voucher, but I’m not giving you one tonight.” He got so angry, he flipped my desk over. And there I was alone in the office up in the bowels of the bank building. We were actually on the fifth floor, but we were in the vault, so it seems like a basement because there was no windows and there was one door in and out. So it was a scary situation for me. The next day he showed up sober, I gave him the gas voucher, and then I was on the phone to my immediate supervisor for service extension and said, “I need out of this building.” So we figured out our budget and I went looking for a new space, and I found a really great 1600 square foot office with lots of windows and lots of doors and much better public access.

Christin Thieme: And it’s only grown from there.

Jenny Hartung: Correct.

Christin Thieme: So you said you have a robust food pantry. What does that look like? What does that entail? How do people access that food, and how does that help to keep families warm and housed during the Wyoming winters?

Jenny Hartung: So our food pantry started in 2017, and I had a $150 a month budget to provide emergency food to families. There was another food pantry in town that I thought was doing a great job and helping people with food, but we saw the same characters every week coming in saying, “Hey, do you have any more mac and cheese?” “Hey, do you have any more fruit?” “Hey, do you have any more bread?” And I realized the problem was a little bit bigger. I did some digging and I looked around and there really wasn’t a food pantry that offered food to make meals, and produce, vegetables, things like that, fresh fruit. And even some snacks and munchies, because we’re Americans, we love our munchies.

So I just sort of started increasing the budget and figuring out ways to source high quality food so that we could help these families in need. We found that a lot of homeless people lived off the food that we were giving them, and if you don’t give people good fuel to put up with the Wyoming winter and they’re unhoused, they’re not going to stay warm and they’re certainly not going to stay healthy. And it’s just really important to us as an organization and Salvation Army as a whole to meet people where they are and treat them with kindness and dignity without discrimination. We’ve grown over the years. We went from serving 20 people a month in our emergency food to now we’re just over 2000 families a month that receive help from us.

So if you do the math, there’s 33,000 people in Gillette, Wyoming, and if we help 2000 families a month times 3.1, that’s 6,200 individuals receive food of some kind from The Salvation Army every single month. So that it’s just gone literally exponentially. As the economy had tanked and then improved, and then inflation got us, there was COVID, there was layoffs, there’s just so many things. And all of those problems led to more homeless population and more people who are having to decide between medicine and food, for example, or rent and utilities or safe tires or brakes on their car or feeding their kids.

And we just decided we were going to take the whole food and feeding piece out of the equation for them by offering this amazing food pantry. It’s a personal choice food bank. And so people come in, they get a grocery cart, and they go through and they choose the items that they want. We usually have three or four different frozen meats. We have three or four different frozen potatoes and starches like that. We have six other proteins at all time. We’re high on protein. We want a lot of protein and a lot of carbs because those are the things that keep people warm and healthy, as well as a whole bunch of produce. And that’s something new that we’ve been able to source is a lot of produce both locally and nationally. But those things are really helping our population be happier and healthier.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, 2000 food boxes a month in a town of 30,000, that says a lot about the need locally.

Jenny Hartung: We’re very underemployed in this economy here in Gillette. So people that were laid off from the coal mines that were making maybe 110,000 a year are now employed with, I don’t know, Arby’s, and they’re making 30,000 or other places. They still had their mortgages and their car payments and all those things, but now they’re getting half or less than the salary they used to have. So they’re incredibly underemployed. A lot of those people don’t qualify to get SNAP benefits or other governmental help. There’s no welfare in the state of Wyoming, so people who don’t work don’t get any help whatsoever. Medicaid is hard to get in this state. Children get it pretty easily, but for adults, Medicaid is difficult to get. So then you have that problem of health and wellness. If you can’t go to the doctor when you have the flu, you’re going to be sicker and give it to more people and so on and so forth.

Christin Thieme: Tell us a little bit more about where all this food comes from.

Jenny Hartung: So last year we gave out $1.2 million worth of food. So you say, how does Salvation Army afford 1.2 million? Well, we didn’t pay that. I spent $67,000 last year on food, up from 150 a month, which was $1,500. So that should tell you how much it grew.

We source it mostly through the Wyoming Food Bank, so it’s an offshoot of Food Bank of the Rockies. So it’s a big Feeding America program that’s offered about two hours south of us, but they ship the food to us and they bring us food three times a month. Tuesdays are always truck day, and we get hordes of volunteers in here to unload all this freight, just thousands and thousands of pounds of freight. Wow. So we source food from them through the government program called TEFAP, T-E-F-A-P, The Emergency Food Assistance Program. And we buy food, we purchase food from them. So that’s the main source of our food is the food bank with Feeding America and the TEFAP program, plus what we buy.

So the TEFAP program gives us some meats, a lot of canned food, dried berries, nuts, cereals, rice, things like that, really super staples. But there aren’t really a lot of meals in those offerings. And so what we do is we buy food that will mix those ingredients together and people can go home and make a meal. Tuna noodle casserole. So we don’t get tuna, so I source tuna. And I source cream of mushroom soup. It’s a simple thing to make. Everyone seems to like it. And it makes one can of tuna feed four people, which is a really good thing when you’re living at or below the poverty level. I mean, it’s an important thing to have enough nutritious food.

Now, some people are going to say tuna noodle casserole is not nutritious. It’s more nutritious than a crummy hamburger from any fast food drive-thru, which is the other choice for the same amount of money. So let’s cook our own food. So that’s our main source of food is through the Feeding America and the Wyoming Food Bank, which they are fabulous programs.

The other way we source food is locally. So we have a food rescue program where we have volunteers that go out from two different adult group homes that live here in town. We’ve employed them as volunteers to go out and pick up this rescue food for us. They bring it in, they sort it, make sure that dates are all good on it, and they package it up to give out to people in the pantry. So we get a lot of sandwiches, pizzas, shelf stable items. There’s four convenience stores here, and they source all of their, what they call waste food to us.

They make hot hamburgers and lettuce wraps, all different kinds of things. And if they sit more than 30 minutes, then they have to pull them off their shelf. Well, they’re still certainly perfectly good. They put them directly into the freezer. And then when they come to us, they’re frozen items. We defrost them and give them out. So that’s a really good way, especially for our homeless and unhoused population, to have items that are already ready-made. Sandwiches, pizza, things that people really like.

Christin Thieme: Is there a family or a story, something that sticks out in your mind that you can say, yeah, this really made an impact for this family? Is there a story you can share?

Jenny Hartung: There is, and we’ve had so many amazing families come through our doors who have had help for a little while, and they have been able to climb up and out of the situation they were in and end up coming back and volunteering.

And that there’s nothing better-

Christin Thieme: That’s cool.

Jenny Hartung: Than to have helped the family and have them come and say, “Hey, it’s my turn to give back to you guys.” And that’s just a phenomenal thing.

So this one family I can think of, the mom’s name is Lorraine, and she has two daughters. She’s a very young widow, and the daughters were, I think they were 10 and 12 when they moved here. And they had been traveling around in an RV dealing with their grief and trying to figure out, because they lost their dad at a very young age. He had cancer, but he died very quickly and they stumbled into Gillette, Wyoming and looked up food pantries and came in and got food from us.

And so the first time Lorraine walked in, she had both her girls with her because they were homeschooling at the time, and we were able to help her with one of those emergency boxes of food I talked about a few years ago. And they took the food home to wherever they were staying at a campground or something here in town. And then a few days later, she came back and said, “Is there any chance I can get some more bread? We’re out of bread.” And she’s out of money. And so of course we helped her with that. We talked to her about long-term solutions to what was going on, got her signed up for SNAP benefits and started helping her look at permanent housing. She got a really good feeling from our community, felt loved and welcome, and I can’t help but think part of that was because of her visit to The Salvation Army and the generosity that we are able to provide because of our great donors. We are so grateful to all the folks who contribute to our mission.

So fast-forward six months or so, it’s summertime, and she and her daughters decide they want to come and volunteer in the food pantry. That was when COVID hit that year in 2020. And so they would come in three days a week and help pack food boxes, take them out to cars. We were on a drive-up only, we were on drive-up only after that point for almost three years, because we outgrew our space and it was all full of food at that point. And so it was all drive-up and we talked to people in the windows of their cars. And in the summer it’s 100 degrees and the wind’s howling, and the winter it’s 30 below and the wind’s howling. So it’s not exactly pleasant, but we had all these great volunteers that would help in that way. It was amazing.

So then fast forward another couple of years, her daughters are thriving. She’s the manager of a local brewery here in town, and I invited her to come on our board. And so she is on our advisory board, and she brings such a great perspective of what it’s like to have to ask for help and what it’s like to also triumph over your tragedy and move forward with kindness and love.

Christin Thieme: That’s incredible.

Jenny Hartung: And so I love having Lorraine on board. She’s a great contributor, and she has a perspective that a lot of people don’t have.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, absolutely. Firsthand.

Jenny Hartung: They didn’t have any money for food at all. She had no SNAP, she had nothing. So I think without the food that we gave them, I think they would’ve moved on to another community and we would’ve lost out, because these are great people to have in our town.

Christin Thieme: Yeah, absolutely. That’s amazing. How has the community at large responded to and supported your growth over these years?

Jenny Hartung: People are so enthusiastic about what we’re doing. We moved to a bigger building because like I said, a few years ago, we grew out of the other building that was 1600 square feet. We moved to a building one-third of a building that’s 5,000 square feet. And just the beginning of January, we took over the lease on the whole building and it’s 15,000 square feet. Our food-

Christin Thieme: Quite the change from the bank.

Jenny Hartung: A long way from the bank. You are right about that. Yeah. Even though it’s only three blocks that way, the bank. But yeah, what a difference.

So we moved into this building initially. We had space for the food pantry, we had space for the offices, and then we had this blank space. And you know how nature loves a vacuum. We had been begged and pleaded, and everyone wanted us to open a thrift shop, and I had to convince leadership it was a good idea and that it would go well here. So we opened a very small thrift shop. It was maybe 1500 square feet. We would sell out of everything. We were only open three days a week. We would sell out of every single thing every week and would have to spend three days restocking all the shelves so that we could open again and so on and so forth. And so what’s coming next.

Little by little, we sort of outgrew that space and we crammed some other stuff in, and I got a storage unit to put some of our storage stuff in. And then in January of this year, we now have all 15,000 square feet, of which 7,000 square feet is the thrift shop. And it is making plenty of money to cover all of our food, plus a lot of rent, utilities and other programs that we provide. So the thrift shop has been just a godsend to us.

The community loves us. I just can’t tell you that we always have more donations than we need. We are run completely by volunteers except myself and my case manager, Tammy. The other 42 people a week here are all volunteers. And they run the thrift shop, start to finish, they run the food pantry, start to finish. And even help us in the office with reception, organizing paperwork, all kinds of things like that. So the community has embraced our growth, and it wouldn’t have been possible without them, honestly, it just wouldn’t have been.

Christin Thieme: It’s really cool that the community has supported you in so many ways and comes out whatever you offer. How do you or do your services adapt throughout the year to meet changing needs? I mean, you’ve mentioned such extremes in temperature. I imagine other needs change throughout the year. So how do things adapt as the weather changes?

Jenny Hartung: I love that. We partner with the Kiwanis Club here in town, and they do something called Kiwanis Coats for Kids, which has also expanded into adults, thankfully. The Kiwanis collect coats for us all year and bibs for snowsuits and all that kind of thing for age zero to, I don’t know, 80 year olds. So all different kinds of coats, warm coats, they often buy a lot of coats, and we distribute those coats for them. So the community came together and said, A lot of people go to Salvation Army that are in need, so why not put our coats there? And I was happy to have a partnership with them to be able to distribute. So that’s kind of a fall winter thing that we do.

And this summertime, we partner with another agency called the From Me to You clothes Swap, and we put together a summer back to school fair, and we gather school clothes, shoes, and then every kind of school supply you can imagine, plus brand new backpacks, as well as a big mobile food pantry that’s also provided by the Wyoming Food Bank. And so it’s kind of a back to school fair. We do it up at one of the churches. And we are able to serve about 500 children with brand new backpacks. They get haircuts, sports physicals if they need them. The food, like I said. And all the yummy school supplies that they need. We just really feel like all the kids need to start with an even playing field when they get back to school. So low-income kids have the same advantages of all the other kids. So that’s a fun thing that we do. We’ve adopted a couple of group homes that have residents that are adults with significant developmental disabilities and cognitive impairments, and we do Christmas for them. And so they’re not the kids that usually go on the angel tree. They’re just a different group altogether. And they’re not so fun to shop for, I don’t think. I don’t know. But we love them. And so our volunteers got together on our board and decided we were going to adopt these two households, and there’s like 34 kids.

Everybody needs a toy. Even in my family, my husband gets a toy. Everybody gets a toy, because, you know, that’s cool. And pajamas and slippers, all the things. So we do that.

And then this year we adopted… Because we didn’t have enough to do, we decided we were going to add a little bit more to our plate, and we adopted the shut-in seniors that are part of the local senior citizen center. These are folks that have no family. They’ve maybe lost their spouse, maybe they’re disabled to the point they can’t get out of their house, especially in the icy cold winters.

And so, we have adopted them, and that’s what we did our angel tree with this year. We were able to partner with Walmart, and we did a Golden Angels tree, and the only requirement was that the senior center would supply the information about these clients, and we farmed them out in the community. And the community did the shopping for all these folks. Some people got brand new beds and mattresses and the whole thing. Another guy got a whole new kitchen, everything because he had just moved and he had two pots and pans and one plate. And so, this person went out and literally outfitted the guy’s entire kitchen.

Another person, it was the saddest thing. I might even cry telling you this. The thing that he wanted that he asked for, because we had them ask for things that they need or want, and he said, “I just want to see my grandkids.” Well, how do you do that? Because I don’t have his name. I just have his specs and his initials, so that privacy and all that. It’s very important.

So I got hold of the senior center and I said, “Is there any way you can figure out who these people are, and any way we can make this happen?” Because it’s literally all he wanted. And we did. We made it happen.

Christin Thieme: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing.

Jenny Hartung: Yeah, a couple of bus tickets and some time, and yay. It was just amazing.

Christin Thieme: That is so cool.

Jenny Hartung: Yeah, our community’s outstanding. Outstanding. And we have a rule here, so this probably helps and it’s good advice, I think, for anyone who runs a nonprofit or even a business. Every single person who walks in our door, we treat them like they’re walking into our home, and we are so happy that you’re here. So they come in. Anyone who walks in the thrift shop, “Welcome in. How are you today? Hey, we have a sale.” We greet everyone who walks in. Even people who want to be anonymous, by the time they leave, they’re smiling and laughing with our staff.

And we have this group of older ladies that do all the cashiering and whatnot, and it’s always the same ladies. And we have a lot of repeat customers, and they’ve gotten to be friends. They invite us to their barbecues now, and they bring their little grandkids in to see where they got that dress. And it’s just fun. It’s just a fun environment here.

And I think that’s part of it. I think that’s part of why the community loves us, because it’s not stuffy. We’re all Christians, and we all do the best we can to show God’s love just in our actions. And if they want to know more, we’ll tell them what we know. And if they want to pray with us, we pray with them. I think our example of Christ’s love is the best thing that we can offer.

Christin Thieme: Yeah. That warmth and welcoming is such a difference maker. I mean, that’s something that all of us can take on and try to do with whoever we encounter. That makes such a big difference for people, especially if they don’t get that welcome in other areas of their life. So I’m sure that that is a big part of that community love for you all.

What about you? What keeps you going? Why are you invested in this work? I imagine there are many challenges along with it, and you’ve had to grow in so many ways over the years. What keeps you going?

Jenny Hartung: Seeing people like Dan and Chantel, and even Lorraine that I talked about, be successful, come out of the grips that the devil had on them in their addiction, help them climb out of poverty and homelessness into self-sufficiency. That’s the stuff that keeps me going. And it’s that case management that we can follow people a long time, and the Army gives us a lot of latitude to just love people and journey with them where they are. That is what keeps me going. That’s what makes me happy.

I’m also a dreamer, and working with The Salvation Army gives me a great opportunity to realize the dreams that I have for our community and our clients.

One of the dreams we’ve had, Tammy, my assistant and I, have had over the last couple of years, is now that we are in this big, beautiful building, it just happens to be, “There are no accidents,” as my mother would say, happens to be zoned R-25, which means 25 residents can live here. And so, we are starting a reentry program for women, Center of Grace. Opening a Center of Grace here in Gillette, Wyoming, to allow women bridge housing to get out of treatment, incarceration, any kind of human trafficking situation, even domestic violence situations, where they can move in and live with us six to 24 months while they get their lives back, and their kids.

So this is one of a kind program in the state of Wyoming where women can actually do their reentry with their children. We found that so many women just can’t… They just don’t stay sober, because once they get out of treatment or incarceration, they go back, because they need their kids, they want their kids, and that’s a situation they live in. So to give them a safe, sober environment to do their treatment and continue on their path back to realizing their full potential is a really exciting thing. And so, that’s the next big thing for us.

We’re feeding lots of people. We’re funding it through our thrift shop, and a lot of people… Our prices are really low. The prices are super low in our thrift shop. All hanging clothes are $1, for example. You can come in and get a brand new pair of Wranglers. Mind you, we’re in Wyoming, so that’s a big deal. Brand new pair of Wranglers for a dollar, or a pair of really cute Vince Camuto shoes for a dollar. So clothes, shoes, belts, bags, and purses are all just $1.

And we sell a lot. And the reason why we sell it so cheap is because we have so much stuff, we wouldn’t be able to go through all the donations people give us. That’s how generous they are.

So anyway, my point is that what keeps me going is God’s love, and he gives me strength every day. It’s the promise of a better life for the clients that we’re serving, and in so doing, it makes a better community for everyone to live here.

Christin Thieme: The dream continues. The growth continues.

Jenny Hartung: Right.

Christin Thieme: I love it. We’ll have to talk to you in a year. It keeps getting bigger and better,

Jenny Hartung: And hopefully it’ll be up and going next year. That is my hope is by spring of next year, we have occupancy.

Christin Thieme: I love it. So many exciting things, so much support. It sounds like Gillette is just an incredible place to be.

Jenny Hartung: You know, it really is. It’s not very pretty, but gosh, the people here make all the difference in the world.

Christin Thieme: The people make up for it.

Jenny Hartung: I mean, compared to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Gillette, it’s the garage. You know what I mean? But the people here make just a huge difference. They’re so kind and so generous, and they all work super hard. Yeah, it’s a good place to be. It’s a good place to live.

Christin Thieme: I love it. Well, we talk a lot about hope on the show, so I like to end our episodes asking people what gives you hope right now?

Jenny Hartung: What gives me hope right now is the fact that the folks in our community who may be struggling are still strong and courageous and try as hard as they can. I have met some of the most amazing, courageous, strong, loving people on their very worst day. That’s the day I meet them, and they turn into, they blossom or become their best version of themselves after someone shows them kindness. And we’re creative with trying to figure out finances and living situations and all those kinds of things. What gives me hope is that people still try really hard.

And that love really is at the center of all that we do. At The Salvation Army, we are encouraged to love our neighbors as ourselves. And if our neighbor is a homeless guy that has swastika tattoos on his face, or if it’s the most angelic missionaries, we love them all the same, just like Jesus did. And we’re encouraged to really do that. And that gives me hope. It gives me hope for the next generations too, because we have a lot of people in their twenties that are volunteering here, or going to college and doing volunteer hours here, and we see them fall in love with the idea of helping others. And that gives me hope, that there’s still those helper folks out there. 

Christin Thieme: I know you’ll agree this is an inspiring example of care and how meeting one need – in this case, the need for food – can lead to warming hearts and homes in so many ways. The Salvation Army’s work in Gillette—with so many volunteers giving of their time to help—really is feeding its neighbors and nourishing an entire community.

And now it’s your turn! This week’s challenge is about taking action to fight hunger in your neighborhood. Here are three ways you can help:

First, consider donating to your local food pantry. Beyond canned goods, consider giving items that create warm, nourishing meals—think soup mixes, hot cereals, even cooking oils. Of course, the gift of funds can help The Salvation Army source exactly what’s needed.

Second, look into volunteer opportunities at your local Salvation Army. As we heard today, small acts of service like helping unload a truck make a big difference.

Third, be aware of your neighbors who might be struggling with food insecurity, especially during these cold winter months. Sometimes a simple conversation can connect someone with life-changing help.

As we like to say, you don’t need to do anything ‘big’ to have a big impact. Every action counts, whether it’s donating food, volunteering time, or simply spreading awareness about available resources.

To find The Salvation Army location nearest you and learn more about food assistance programs in your area, visit westernusa.salvationarmy.org.

Join us next week as we continue our Warm Hearts, Warm Homes series, exploring more ways to spread warmth and hope in your community.

Until then, keep choosing hope and doing good, right where you are.

Additional resources:

• If you are one of the hopefuls, get on the list for the Do Good Digest, our free 3-minute weekly email newsletter used by more than 20,000 hopefuls like you for a quick pick-me-up in a busy day.  
• If you are enjoying this show and want to support it, leave a rating and review wherever you listen to help new listeners hit play for the first time with more confidence.  
• If you want to help The Salvation Army serve more than 24 million Americans in need each year, give today. Your gift of money, goods or time helps The Salvation Army do good all year in your community.  

Listen and subscribe to the Do Gooders Podcast now.