“There is immense power when a group of people with similar interests gets together to work toward the same goals.”

 

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

 

 

Fighting Food Insecurity with Fellowship, Community, and Service
 

In 1905 a middle-aged attorney by the name of Paul Harris took a walk on a cold night in Chicago. He thought about his boyhood in the verdant hills of Vermont with his grandparents, and his challenging days of studies at Princeton. He was lonely in this burgeoning city of industry. He needed companionship and peers to share ideas, conversations.

 

The city of Chicago at the turn of the 20th Century bustled with industrial growth. Unchecked by regulation, it grew rapidly into a major hub for transportation and commerce. Chicago became a major rail center, processing and shipping goods to markets across the country and to Europe. Within this major rail hub and port, industrial tycoons focused on processing and distributing goods like grain, meat, and lumber. The growth of industry brought immigrants, nearly doubling its population in the first decade. By 1910, Chicago was home to 2.2 million people.

 

At the same time across town, Upton Sinclair, a journalist, lived undercover with the laboring immigrants working the meat processing plants, reporting the deplorable living and working conditions the people from Western and Eastern Europe were exposed to in the meat processing industry. He wrote a series of newspaper articles in 1905, which became one of the many banned books of the century, entitled The Jungle, published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1906. The true-to-life expose of conditions in the Chicago stockyards led to a huge public outcry and the federal legislative action of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act as well as the Meat Inspection Act in 1906.

 

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Harris, two attorney colleagues and a business client (Gustavus Loehr, Silvester Schiele, and Hiram Shorey) gathered at Loehr’s office in downtown Chicago on February 23, 1905 for what would become the first professional Rotary club meeting. There’s much more history one can find with a bit of searching on the beginning of Rotary, but I have always wondered how these two juxtaposed social events affected the other. The cauldron of Chicago’s social stew mixed with the harshness of industrial dominance had to be a leading factor in the creation and outcome of both events.

 

Harris’s desire to create an atmosphere where diverse individuals could exchange ideas and foster fellowship quickly evolved to include community service and expanded Rotary’s work into the the world of community service projects. The Chicago club’s first service initiative led to the establishment of public restrooms in Chicago in 1907.

 

A form and idea behind the Rotary motto “Service Above Self” was first adopted in 1911, the idea forming from a speech by a Chicago Rotarian during the first convention of 16 Rotary clubs in 1910, held in Chicago. With the chartering of the Rotary Club of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Rotary expanded its boundaries into international territory and by 1922 adopted the name Rotary International.

 

Today, Rotary International encompasses over 35,000 clubs worldwide, covering six continents, with over 1.4 million individuals known as Rotarians. I am one of them – a member of the Rotary E-Club of District 7545, DBA: Mountain State Rotary E-Club, the only E-club in West Virginia. The Rotary International Board in 2001 approved the first E-club charter. My club was chartered in 2012, with Richard Phalunas of Morgantown as charter president. E-clubs are similar to what we call “terra clubs”, only our meetings are held online. Our core values are the same, our service is the same.

 

During the mid-20th Century (1930s-1980s) when Rotary saw not only growth into a global membership, but also growth into gender inclusion of women in 1989, the organization recognized the importance of leadership development. Thus Rotary clubs are structured: Board of Directors, president, vice president, treasurer and so forth. It takes work, fellowship, and trust to serve in any of these capacities. I served as president of my club from 2019-2021. All presidents, and the club members and communities they work with, like to leave a legacy of service. Mine was simple.

 

A successful community service project needs only a few ingredients. We worked with two local non-profits to create community engagement, threw in 100 percent Rotary club support to raise funds, which in turn, produced an end result of a lot of happy kids.

 

I met now retired executive director, Brenda Hunt, at the Barbour County Community Garden Market in 2018. The Garden Market is a subsidiary of Heart and Hand House, Inc., based in Philippi, Barbour County, West Virginia, offering local and regional farmers an outlet to sell their products on a consignment basis. It’s a great place to visit, to shop for local grown vegetables and meats. On Wednesdays, they offer the best Amish doughnuts to be found anywhere!

 

Heart and Hand House, Inc. is a non-profit mission project affiliated with the United Methodist Church that exists for the clear Christian mandate to minister to the physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional needs of in-crisis, low-income people of Barbour County. As part of their mission, they have for years administered a Backpack program in several Barbour County public elementary schools. The Backpack program is part of the national network, Feeding America, a non-profit that helps battle food insecurity in the United States. Backpack programs ensure children deemed food insecure have food for the weekends and for special break periods, during times when school is not in session when they do not receive their school lunches.

 

Hunt agreed to work with our Rotary E-Club in what we would call the Barbour County Backpack program. We had our non-profit recipient, now we needed a fundraising source. Enter the Tucker Community Foundation and its annual “Run For It” event held the last weekend in September.

 

As R. H. Tawney, the English economic historian, Christian socialist, and proponent of adult education so aptly put it, “Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and social organization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some practical emergency.”
 
The Tucker Community Foundation (TCF) was founded over 35 years ago by a dedicated group of forward-looking and philanthropic-minded volunteers who recognized a need and set out to address it.
 
What started as a group of “Tucker people helping Tucker people,” – spurred by the aftermath of the 1985 Election Day floods (also known in West Virginia as the Killer Floods of 1985, which was one of the costliest and devastating floods to affect West Virginia at that time) – grew to become a regional organization of “people helping people” on a much broader scale.
 
The “ pressure from the emergency” of the devastating flood brought together a group of ambitious Tucker County citizens who realized this was the opportunity to equip the community with the necessary resources to renew and sustain itself. This humble beginning of a grass roots effort helped the local community rebuild and establish the philanthropic organization that continues to enhance the quality of life for the people it serves.
 
Today, through various fundraisers and regional communities support, the TCF is now a formidable economic and community development organization.
 
In 2024, this dynamic organization has awarded over $3.2 million in grant awards to over 79 nonprofits and distributed over $109,399 in scholarship awards to 71 students within their service region encompassing nine West Virginia counties (Barbour, Grant, Mineral, Pendleton, Pocahontas, Preston, Randolph, Tucker, and Upshur counties) and one county in Maryland (Garrett County).

Through the rise and fall of much of the small, rural Appalachian towns in the Tucker Community Foundation’s service area, one thing that remains consistent is the presence of the Foundation in each of these communities.
 

 

Since its inception in 2007, the annual event, “Run For It” has grown exponentially. Last year 1,4005 registrants representing 79 community causes participated in the 2K walk and USATF-certified 5K run around the scenic mountaintop town of Davis, WV during the annual Leaf Peepers Festival held the last Saturday in September. Nearly $315,000 was raised for local charities throughout the Foundation’s region.
 
The program was designed to promote a healthy activity while encouraging local philanthropy. “Run For It” kicks off each year on April 1. Teams may join anytime up to the August 31 deadline. The TCF challenges participants to form teams to support the community cause of their choice during a six-month campaign. Cash awards are given to the teams raising the most awareness and support for their charity, along with demonstrating the best effort. Additionally, half of the entry fees, 100 percent of team sponsor donations, and 100 percent of race day awards are distributed to the cause represented.

 

To offset the 2020 pandemic and its affect on so many outdoor group activities, the TCF created a virtual “Run For It”. Virtual participation is perfect for clubs like ours where membership is widespread, or where the groups of people who are unable to complete the physical event on a hilly mountaintop still have the right to participate at their own pace and space. 

 

Last year our club opted for the mixed version: some walked virtually, some traversed the mountain village to take in the fellowship of the Leaf Peeper Festival. In the six years our Rotary E-club has participated in this fundraiser for Heart and Hand House we have raised approximately $20,000 for kids in Barbour County. Of this amount raised, our Rotary International District 7545 granted us $5,500.00 throughout the six year period, which has been very much appreciated.

 

 

According to Heart and Hand House Emergency Services Director, Rachel Caprio, the total number of food insecure children in the public school system increases yearly. During the 2024-25 school year, the organization fed 420 students every weekend and during holiday periods. The organization tries to add more schools to their list each year, depending upon funds to be disbursed. In 2018, the year we initiated the project, we fed 150 kids. Now at 420, we’re looking at a 180 percent increase. 2025-26 will again see an increase.

 

We look forward to the upcoming 2025-26 Rotary year beginning July 1, and another year helping hungry kids eat well. If you are interested in joining us and our team, contact the Mountain State Rotary E-Club: mtn.state.rotary.eclub@gmail.com

 

I’ll leave you with this thought, “Whatever Rotary may mean to us, to the world it will be known by the results it achieves.” – Paul Harris