Pork support: Outreach Community Center brings home the bacon

WINCHESTER, Ill. — A big role that the Outreach Community Center, founded by Kenny and Marsha Mayner in 2010, plays is providing food for people in Scott County and surrounding counties.

“When we first started, we were just serving Scott County. Now we serve anywhere from seven, eight, nine counties away. We do a lot more than Scott County. We take care of several counties,” Marsha said.

They source the food that they donate in a variety of ways.

One of their more recent donations came via a Facebook contest from the Illinois Pork Producers Association. To mark October as Pork Month, the IPPA did a Facebook contest with the hashtag #PassTheBacon.

The idea was for people to nominate charitable groups and organizations to receive 50 boxes of precooked Hormel bacon. The winning nominators would get 10 boxes of the bacon, five of which they had to pass on to others.

The contest had over 1,900 entries. Seven Illinois charities were chosen, along with their nominators.

Outreach Community Center was one of them. Their nominator was Deanna Morris of Winchester.

This isn’t the first time the center has been the beneficiary of pork through an IPPA program.

The center also received ground pork through the IPPA’ “Pork Power” program, which allows producers to donate pigs, that are processed into ground pork. That pork is distributed to each of the state’s regional foodbanks and food pantries get the pork through those foodbanks.

The Mayners welcome donations of non-perishable and non-expired food items.

Due to the increased need in the area, they said they are concerned about how they will meet the needs of the people who use the center, not just for the holidays, but going into winter.

The pandemic has put buying limits onto many of the items that the Mayners would purchase to supplement what they get from the Central Illinois Food Bank.

“Our concerns about food are pretty high right now. It’s just been really hard to get things because the donations are down, even at the foodbank,” Marsha said.

The shortages that shoppers have experienced at grocery stores have filtered through to giving organizations like the Outreach Community Center.

“As everybody else feels the pinch, we’re feeling the pinch. We’re trying to keep stuff on the shelves so when someone calls and says ‘I’ve got three kids and I’m out of food, can you help me?’ then we can help them. We always want to say, yes, we can help, but it’s getting harder and harder. We don’t want to buy food retail if we don’t have to because it’s a lot of money and now, there are limits on how much we can buy. For us, as time has gone along, it’s gotten harder and harder to get dry goods, cereal, rice, that kind of thing. It’s been a struggle here lately to get what we need,” Kenny said.

With their annual Christmas giveaway coming up, Marsha said the demand could be greater than ever before — or less, due to concerns over coronavirus. This year’s event will look different as families who want to participate will have to pre-register and fill out a form.

Gift packages will be made up in advance and handed out. That’s a change from past years, when a shopping-style event was conducted.

“We could see that maybe our numbers will be down because they don’t want to fill out the form or our numbers could be higher than ever before because of the lack of jobs and lack of money. We might have people registering for this Christmas giveaway who have never come to the center before because they have never been in the situations they are now in,” Marsha said.