Brother Terry O'Rourke—Aberdeen, Mississippi
Helping to Feed a Rural County
 

Brother Terry O'Rourke hauls surplus food from a donated warehouse to the parish for third-Friday distribution.

Can you imagine organizing and distributing over 14,000 pounds of food for hungry people in your county? Glenmary Brother Terry O’Rourke does it on the third Friday of every month. “That’s when people start to run out of food stamps,” he explains. He and the volunteers who help him refer to this outreach effort as a “boost-a-month.”

Brother Terry is the coordinator of what is officially called the Monthly Food Assistance Program in Mississippi’s rural Monroe County. Poverty there is a fact of life and the unemployment rate is in the double digits.

An outreach minister from St. Francis of Assisi Church in Aberdeen, Mississippi, he  got involved with feeding hungry families two and half years ago when the local food pantry decided to stop distributing USDA surplus foods. Glenmary Father Tim Murphy, pastor of St. Francis, and Brother Terry thought the parish should pick up where the food pantry left off. And parishioners agreed!

In addition to the USDA surplus, major food chains allow the Monthly Food Assistance Program to buy food at 14 cents a pound. “We use money from St. Francis and other donations to buy the extra food,” Brother Terry reports. St. Francis Parish donates 10 percent of its annual collection to outreach which includes this food assistance program.

St. Francis of Assisi Church, a Glenmary mission since 1965, is involved in many ways besides the finances. “It is always on the agenda for the monthly parish council meetings,” Brother Terry points out. One parishioner has donated 5,000 square feet of warehouse space to store the food when it comes in. He also provides the tractor trailer to transport food from the warehouse to the church every third Friday for packing and distribution.

Brother Terry oversees about 10 volunteers from St. Francis and other local churches. The Methodist minister and some of his parishioners are very involved. They help line up supplies and store some of the food. A couple from the First Christian Church comes every third Friday to volunteer. In the Glenmary spirit, “boost-a-month” is an ecumenical effort.

Volunteers pack canned fruits and vegetables, dried pasta, cereal and snacks into boxes that eventually weigh 40 pounds each. In the early months, volunteers packed boxes for only 35 families; now they pack an average of 450 boxes a month. Over 800 families, however, are on the registration list.

“But not all the families come every month,” says Brother Terry. “So I have never had to turn people away.”

The only requirement to receive a box of food is filling out the USDA form which asks for family history, income and number of children. No other questions are asked.

“We very much take the Catholic Worker model in helping the families,” he emphasizes. “We don’t judge, we don’t try to change them. We just try to do as Christ would do—treat the people with respect and take care of them when they come to our door.”

For current assignment