“We normally see 30 to 40 clients a day,” said the manager of a Joplin, Missouri food pantry. “Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a sharp decrease in number of clients, sometimes as few as four a day.” This is not what I expected to hear when I visited this food pantry to learn about their programs. But their experience is not an anomaly.

  James Whitford Executive Director   Versions of this article were also published by The Federalist and The Joplin Globe. Face masks are “all we’ve got right now to fight […]

  By Savannah Aleckson, published in the Joplin Globe on May 3rd, 2020   It’s been a historic year already, and we’re not even halfway through 2020. From the onset of the COVID-19 […]

I love our fight for civil society. It’s not just Joplin. Communities throughout the Midwest fight to retain hospitality and restore neighborliness while volunteers care for their community members struggling […]

by James Whitford Our Founding Fathers said so.  The debate as to whether helping those in need should be a matter of public or private funding is not new. Few […]

By James Whitford, published in the Joplin Globe on July 6th, 2018 In the afterglow of this past week’s Fourth of July celebrations, I remain grateful for those who fought […]