Volunteers get ready for annual charity kit distribution

DEXTER, Mo. -- It is a much-anticipated local event involving many helping hands and generous hearts. It's the Festival of Sharing, and on Saturday, the mini-festival will conduct its sixth annual effort to collect and distribute items to aid the needy in much of the Bootheel.

Leaving a legacy

This year, the mini Festival of Sharing will be held in remembrance of a woman who helped bring it to Dexter, eliminating hundreds of miles of travel for local residents and agencies who benefit from the effort. Ruth Mayer, a retired teacher from Dexter who helped organize the original mini Festival of Sharing in Dexter, died after a brief illness in 2007.

"Ruth was involved with the efforts of the Festival of Sharing for years and recognized the need and efficiency in setting up a satellite festival locally that would eliminate the cost in both time and fuel for churches and agencies to travel to the state festival at Sedalia to accomplish what we could do right here in Dexter," said organizer Mary Ann Taylor.

"Ruth started on a smaller level on the lot of the First Christian Church, and we eventually merged with a similar project in Sikeston six years ago and have been operating the festival out of the First United Methodist Church now for three years," Taylor said.

Assembling the kits

The Festival of Sharing is an effort to supply kits containing staples such as paper products, rice and beans to Missourians in need. Several agencies converge on Dexter one Saturday each October to transport the goods back to their hometowns.

Before the delivery, however, dozens of volunteers form crews at the church to accept deliveries of assembled kits that arrive by car, truck and van. The kits are counted, stacked and labeled for pickup later in the day.

Volunteers work in assembly-line fashion to bag the donated rice, beans, popcorn and other items into individual portions for the food kits. Others organize kits containing paper products, infant needs and bedding. There are dental kits, personal hygiene kits and other kits that are assembled, boxed and bagged, ready to distribute to the agencies.

"The Southeast area collects and distributes for 27 different agencies serving the needy," Taylor said.

Some of those agencies include gospel missions and shelters, such as the Stoddard County Gospel Mission and the Center for Family Resources in Malden, Mo. Other agencies include the Mother to Mother Program, Stoddard County ARC and food pantries in Puxico, Mo., and Bloomfield, Mo.

Donations needed

Taylor said that although enough kits are expected to arrive Saturday and plenty of workers are scheduled to be on hand, there is still a need for cash donations.

"Our goal was to purchase 4,000 pounds of rice from a local mill to be bagged and given to the needy," Taylor said. "We have not received enough cash donations to purchase as much rice as we had last year, and with our current economic situation, the need is even greater than it was in 2007."