lst-year student fights hunger

A first-semester freshman at John Brown University has piloted a program that allows Harps Food Stores shoppers in Siloam Springs to plug into the needs of the community on their cell phones and respond to those needs while standing in the grocery store.

Tess Constant, 18, of Overland Park, Kan., is the student leader for a project deemed Buy Out Hunger, a collaboration between a freshman orientation class called Gateway and Enactus, formerly the Students in Free Enterprise, at JBU.

Interested shoppers text a five-digit number (55958), enter the word “hunger” and receive a short list of the most urgent needs of The Manna Center, a food pantry and clothing/thrift store in Siloam Springs. The center has provided food, clothing and other assistance to more than 6,500 people so far this year.

Donations can be left at the front of the Harps store in a bin decorated with posters about the program, then Constant and her team of five classmates deliver the goods to Manna. Constant said she recently delivered five bags of goods to the food pantry, including tea bags, peanut butter, canned meats and soup. She expects to make another run with goods for Manna before she leaves town for Christmas break.

Constant assembled her team from professor Mandy Moore’s Gateway class before Thanksgiving and launched the project Nov. 30. The team plans to carry it out at least through Christmas, possibly longer.

The idea for Buy Out Hunger came from student Enactus advisor Clayton Anderson, and Constant simply ran with it. Maintaining the program takes roughly five minutes a week, Anderson said. After getting the list of needed goods from Manna, all that’s left is to log the list into the back end of the text-message campaign.

“It’s 100 percent automated,” Anderson said.

Constant and her team-mates chose a text-message marketing service and struck a deal to pay just 10 cents per text message. So far, the students have had to sink about $30 into the program.

“A program like this really takes time to build up the numbers, but I think that as we continue to fine tune the program we’ll be able to find a way that really speaks to the people in the community and we’ll be able to get their attention.”

Her favorite part of the project has been making the connections with the peopleinvolved - the manager at the Harps store and the supervisor of The Manna Center.

“It is connecting with the people that I’ve found I’ve enjoyed the most,” she said.

If proven successful, Buy Out Hunger could be duplicated in other areas, Anderson said.

All the students involved will get class credit from Moore for their work on the program.

“It’s good to see a lot of freshmen students caring about people in our community and doing good things,” Moore said. “It comes at a hard time of the year, which helps too.”