Brent Crane has been with the Food and Care Coalition for 35 years, so he has a lot of experience and expertise to share when it comes to serving and helping the homeless and those in poverty. On this episode he starts off explaining how the Food and Care Coalition began as a truly grassroots movement, the ways they collaborate with other organizations to help meet their clients needs, and of course he shares some great stories that truly illustrate the good their organization is doing, as well as the volunteers and donors that work with them.
After this interview, I felt so inspired to act on ideas I’ve had for ways me and my family can serve and help in this area, and Brent gives a lot of good ideas too. Give it a listen and you might hear something that inspires you to want to serve as well.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Food and Care Coalition Website
Food and Care Coalition volunteer coordinator email: volunteer@ foodandcare.org
Food and Care Coalition Instagram
Food and Care Coalition Facebook
Follow the podcast on social media:
Do Something More Instagram
Do Something More Facebook
Brent Crane has been with the Food and Care Coalition for 35 years, so he has a lot of experience and expertise to share when it comes to serving and helping the homeless and those in poverty. On this episode he starts off explaining how the Food and Care Coalition began as a truly grassroots movement, the ways they collaborate with other organizations to help meet their clients needs, and of course he shares some great stories that truly illustrate the good their organization is doing, as well as the volunteers and donors that work with them.
After this interview, I felt so inspired to act on ideas I’ve had for ways me and my family can serve and help in this area, and Brent gives a lot of good ideas too. Give it a listen and you might hear something that inspires you to want to serve as well.
Links mentioned in the episode:
Food and Care Coalition Website
Food and Care Coalition volunteer coordinator email: volunteer@ foodandcare.org
Food and Care Coalition Instagram
Food and Care Coalition Facebook
Follow the podcast on social media:
Do Something More Instagram
Do Something More Facebook
Melissa: You're listening to the Do Something more podcast, and this is episode number 44 with Brent Crane from the Food and Care Coalition serving the homeless population. Welcome to the Do Something More podcast, a service or show where we highlight the helpers who inspire us all to do something more. I'm your host, Melissa Draper. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. And I'm really looking forward to this interview because I have not featured an organization like the Food and Care Coalition today that helps the homeless and those in poverty. And I think especially this time of year where we've just finished with the holidays, this is a good time to be reminded of the needs and the ways that we can serve in that area. But first, I'd like to welcome here to the episode my guest, Brent Crane with the Food and Care Coalition. Brent, welcome to the show.
Brent: Thank you for having me. I think you're right. It's a good time of year to talk about it, and it is one of those issues that I think is kind of front and center in terms of our mindset through the holidays and particularly during the winter months as we are concerned about our homeless brothers and sisters on the street. So glad to be here and look forward to the conversation.
Melissa: Yeah, well, why don't you start off by just introducing yourself a little bit, and then you can go into the basics of the food and Care coalition and what you do there.
Brent: Yeah, I got involved with the coalition back in the late 1980s, and I'll kind of go over kind of the genesis of that. But I had just come home from serving an LDS church mission back in Philadelphia. I was a business major before leaving. When I came home, I felt just I want to do something in my career that I enjoy to do that has an impact other than just pulling in a check to support my family. And obviously, that was a very naive point of view at that point in time, particularly as I recognize we rely on the community that has maybe excess funding that they can use to support our mission and other social missions out there in the community. But it really kind of turned me. And so I did a lot of internships. I did one at the state hospital. I did one with the food bank at the time, which was run by community Action Agency. And then I did one with a newly formed organization that had just formed in the fall of 88 called the Food and Care Coalition. And as I got involved, I just fell in love with the mission and with how in touch with the mission that the employees and the volunteers were. Finished my schooling at Brigham Young University with my undergraduate in family studies, and then went on to do a master's in nonprofit management at the U of U. Got married during that time, started raising a family. We've got four kids, all adults now, so they range from 30 down to 22 and five grandkids, and live in Mapleton and have just really enjoyed my time to interact with the community over these almost 35 years now.
Melissa: That's so impressive that you've basically been there your whole career.
Brent: Yeah, basically. Right? Yeah. Right. At the birth of the organization. And I was very fortunate to have a board at the time when I was hired as the director that basically said, look, we're going to give you some autonomy and let you take this where you feel your heart leads you to take it. And so it's certainly been, I guess, a mission of love over the years and finding a way where I can impact the world, albeit small, in my own little way. And again, kind of have my stone polished by the community. I've just met so many good people over the years, from donors to volunteers to interns to employees to clients and political leadership, and you just rub shoulders in a lot of different areas with this kind of work.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: It's been a blessing to me. I've received far more in return than what I've given.
Melissa: Right. Anyway, most definitely. Well, it definitely has grown over the years. As I mentioned before we started this interview, I first learned about the food and Care Coalition 20 years ago as a college student and volunteered some time there. And I know it's grown since then and the things that it's involved in and does. So I would just love you have to share with us the basic mission of the Food and Care Coalition and what purposes you're hoping to fulfill with the work you do.
Brent: I think you have to understand why we even came into existence to begin with to really answer that question. And back in the mid 1980s and even a little bit before then in the late 70s, we went through a public policy shift where we were defunding mental health institutions. So prior to that time frame, during the mindset was, if anybody's suffering from mental illness, it's best to just simply kind of lock them up and throw away the key. And medication was very experimental at the time because that was what was viewed as safe for society. And then human rights advocates got involved and said, wait a second. We can't just be locking people up against their will and they don't have family. We shouldn't just be locking people up and removing them from the society's influence. And even though they may have needs, there's got to be a better way. And so that tension over a number of years led to some new public policy where individuals that were in state hospitals were essentially indiscriminately released into the community, and many of them did not have familial safety net to fall back on.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: And it led to the community being involved. And so what happened? What we started to see happen in Provo was in the mid 80s. Homelessness started to proliferate because of this policy shift. Community advocates were like, well, we don't have this level of services. We have the state hospital, but they were just released from the state hospital, so that's not an option. Where do we go? What do we do? The first wave of the community that was hit was our religious community, wherein people that were now homeless were going to our religious community and saying, hey, I need help. And so, to their credit, there were multiple agencies, multiple religious, faith based groups, obviously Lds groups, but there were the episcopal church in downtown Provo, the St. Francis Catholic Church in downtown Provo, the community Church of Christ, 7th day Adventist, and others were being solicited for help from this population. And there really wasn't services that catered to them. There wasn't a place where they could get meals or do their laundry, shower, or get clothing or things of that nature. The only thing that really existed at that time was the food bank. And the food bank really essentially just turned around food to households that already had a roof over their head and had a stove and had the means to cook their own food. And so that led to several conversations and meetings between the different religious groups. And then we were incubated by a group called Utah's against hunger, which is a policy and advocacy group out of Salt Lake. They lent us their 501 while we went through the organizational structure of, okay, who are we going to be? Okay, we need to address homelessness. Well, what is that going to look like? What's our resource base? And so it started out with really almost like a $60,000 a year budget, and it was the different churches that would lend their facilities on rotational services, sack lunches, and then it just kind of evolved from there. And then once we got our own 501 in the fall of 1988, then the charge was, well, let's coalesce community support. And so, started out small, obviously started out primarily, as you mentioned earlier in the podcast, was that it was just really a means to make sure that people were fed first, and then it led to, oh, well, let's make sure they're showered and let's make sure their laundry is clean and that they have the clothing. And then eventually led to some housing options and case management and all those other services we provide today and more. So that's kind of how we started. It truly was a grassroot movement. This was our community's response to a community need that we saw that was local. While it had an impact from policy at the federal level that was very much detached from us from a local level, we as a community, grassroot efforts coalesced resources and started this organization to meet the need.
Melissa: Yeah, well, and I love that you share the history there and take the time because I know homelessness is a multifaceted issue and it's, I think, so important for the rest of us to educate ourselves and to understand some of the underlying things that are happening, to know why we're helping and serving in this area. So that's great. Well, I've also seen, as you said, you've grown to be able to provide more than just feeding, to provide those other basic needs. But as I look at your website, there are so many different projects that you are working in to make a difference. Would you just like to share some of those things that food and care coalition are doing, some of your more unique things that you're doing to meet the needs in your community?
Brent: Yeah, I think one of the things that I think has steered us in the direction that we've been was really experiential learning from how we came into existence as we were kind of identifying what our role was in the community. And the community rallied around and supported what we were doing or not doing that shaped kind of who you become. But one of the things that was really surprising to me was that in the for profit, in the capitalistic right, we encourage and promote competition. And often competition comes via, you know, we have McDonald's on one corner, Carl's Jr. On one corner, Burger King and a wendy's right. It seems like when one pops up, another one's going to pop up because they're going to create that competition which creates choice, which then leads it to consumer driven change. Well, in our case, I was really surprised that there was not more cooperative involvement between agencies.
Melissa: Organizations.
Brent: Yes, organizations. There was certainly a competition for Garce resource dollars, whether that's charitable dollars or foundation dollars or corporate dollars or volunteerism or whatever it was. I kind of came in a little naive thinking, oh, people are going to be more cooperative. And what I found was a very siloed system where everybody was kind of working independently. And honestly, quite frankly, it ended up being to the detriment of the client. And I'll give you a perfect example of that. So say we have a client that is marginalized and they haven't been able to retain employment, and so you have maybe an agency that's more centristic on helping a client get retained disability payment. Right. They focus on a path towards, oh, this client can't compete with the workforce. They're going to fall behind. And because of that, let's make sure that they've got a basis of income through Social Security disability so that they can at least survive. So one agency may be approaching that same client from that mindset, and then another agency may be looking and saying, hey, well, you may be on the deficient side of your skills at this particular time, but let's enhance those. Let's go out and improve your skill set, improve your education, improve your work history, so that you can get better employment, better pay, go from part time to full time, or go from barely minimum wage to a survivable wage in our community. Well, we found that a lot of clients would be pulled in those two different directions by different agencies. Yet you can't go down both paths at the same time. They're divergent paths. So one of the things that I looked at was, why are we so siloed? And so when we were growing over the years, we realized part of this was my board would say, okay, Brent, you need to operate this program. Well, let's go out and find a way where we can do it, where it's going to cost very little, or we rely mostly on volunteers. And over time, I wised up and said, look, we've got to have a core basis of services so that there's consistency of services. But I can only go out and get so many volunteers. And if I was to take any entrepreneur out there and say, hey, I'm going to take your most valued employee, and I'm going to turn that into a volunteer position, I think most of those entrepreneurs would realize our business will suffer greatly if that's the case, just because of turnover. Not capable. It's just the turnover and the institutional knowledge that they have, et cetera. So we knew that we needed to have a basis of that, and so we wanted to grow responsibly. So we have been very slow and deliberate in what programs and services we had over the years, but we've tempered that with creating community collaborative partnerships.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: So right now, the organization we provide last year, 100,000 mills. That was all through our organizational efforts to do that. We provided $100,000 worth of hygiene product to our clients. We had 4000 loads of laundry and showers that were done at our facility. We provided over 40,000 nights of housing through our facility, through our various housing programs. We provided case management and educational curriculum and other things like that. But we augmented that with, we now have the mental health authority that is stationed in our building. And so instead of me having to send a mentally ill client 2 miles up the road where they may never enter their door, we now have that service right here on site for the clients. And so that's therapy, that's additional case management, that's some self improvement classes and individual and group therapy classes and things like that, that can benefit from. We've got a medical clinic in partnership with Mount Land Community Health center. We had done the dental project through partnership with share a smile up until 2015. And Dr. Vogel, Eric Vogel, who we had partnered with, had passed away and just wasn't in a position, family and entity at the time to carry that forward. And so we partnered with mountain lands to fill that void, as well as address medical concerns and needs of our clients that are coming in. Because a lot of our homeless, they either don't get medical care or they go to our most costly point of entry, which is often inappropriate because their needs are not commensurate with that. And that is our ers.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: And then we've created a lot of other smaller partnerships. We've got an educational partnership with a group called my story Matters. We're really excited about that one because we all know the analogy of, you feed them anafish, you feed them for a day, you teach them an official, feed them for a lifetime. Now that we have food, pretty much we're consistent with that service. Now that we have significant housing available here on site, we have 112 units that we operate between transitional and permanent supportive housing here on site. What we really felt we were lacking was that last component, which is the educational component. And so we've partnered with a group that has actually devised a curricula that was intended for people that are coming out of the jail. But we found that a lot of their curriculum was very pertinent to our homeless population and helping them achieve greater proficiency and understanding about their choices and why they make the choices they do and what choices lead out of poverty and which choices keep you in poverty. Right?
Melissa: Right.
Brent: Anyways, and then we've got things like the bicycle collective that do bikes for our clients. And we've got a group called Tom Knox up in Salt Lake that will give suits to clients that successfully transition out of some of our educational programming. We've got America's best down in spanish fork that provide. It's a business that just said, hey, we want to provide free eye exams and free eyeglasses to your homeless clientele. So our case managers, once a week, take a group down there to get that service, and they donate that. And so there's probably about 40 different partnerships that our organization is tied into. That, in one sense or another, benefits our clientele. Even in BYU nursing, Uvu school of Hygiene, we even have a genealogy lab up at BYU. They don't come in, proselyte their faith, but they will come in and do a four generation chart for any of our homeless clients that wants one.
Melissa: That's great.
Brent: And so it's just about the community coalescing support around the need.
Melissa: Right. I love how you share about that idea of collaboration because there's so many good things that come out of that. It allows, first of all, for you to focus on your strengths and your mission and your purpose, and that's good so that you don't get too strung out over everything you're trying to do. And then it invites others to come in and share what their strengths are. And I think, like you said, there's so many nonprofits, so many organizations where what you're doing, the mission that you have overlaps in so many ways, and so it makes sense to be able to help and work towards your goals together. So I love that.
Brent: I think the community should expect that they should expect cooperation.
Melissa: They should.
Brent: We're in some preliminary discussions right now with BYU and UVU to do some additional research. We're actually right in the middle of a research project with Utah State University and BYU on a nutrition study and exercise study for the homeless population.
Melissa: Wow.
Brent: But we're looking for other opportunities where, again, we can coalesce that support that already exists in our community and say, hey, how can we work together to achieve efficiencies? We operate a four and a half acre campus 365 days a year. Twenty four seven. And we do it for about a $1.4 million cash budget. That's unheard of. But the reason we can do that is in part because of those collaborative partnerships that they bring other resources to bear as well. Right. For the benefit of the population. And who cares who gets the credit? I mean, really, right.
Melissa: You're all achieving the same goal.
Brent: We're all working towards the same end, right?
Melissa: That's great. I love that. Well, on this podcast, we do always love to hear kind of the human interest side of the story. So are there any specific stories or experiences that you can share that kind of illustrate either more of this collaborative that you've been talking about or some of the other things that the food and Care coalition has done?
Brent: Yeah, I'll share you a couple of them. I'll try to be as brief as I can, but there was one that was very influential in my early days. I had just taken over as the director. This was in 1993, and at the time, I would come in, my day looked like I'd come in, I would do breakfast because we had limited staff. So I would come in, do the breakfast, and then when our cook got there, she would take over kind of the final kitchen cleanup and getting the volunteers, finishing up and getting things prepped for lunch and that kind of thing. And then I would go upstairs and do my administrative things, grant writing or public speaking or whatever. There was a client that I had befriended. It was a female client that was significantly learning disabled, had some mental health challenges, and had always had such really good interactions with this individual and always said hi, always joked, always tried to keep things light and relationship oriented. And that morning, I came in and we were out of milk, and so I had to leave some volunteers in charge while I ran across the street. This was when we were over on 200 north in Provo, and I ran over to Smith's, ran in, grabbed some milk, and as I ran in, here's this client that I had not seen yet today that saw me, got so excited and yelled out my name. And my first instinct was to dismiss her. My first instinct was, I don't know who this is. I'm embarrassed. She's embarrassing me by yelling my name out in front of people in the store. And as soon as that feeling came into my mind and heart, I was immediately reprimanded. That internal voice said, wait a second. What do you care what these other people think if you're affiliated or associated with this learning disabled child of mine? Right? And that experience was very shaping to me in my early days because I realized when I was at work, I was in a comfort zone when working with the population. But this was the first opportunity I had where I was experiencing this out in the community with my peers. And I was just really disappointed in myself that I had these feelings of inadequacy, that I cared what other people thought. That was a life lesson that I learned early on. And that has kind of kept me grounded. And it's one of the reasons why I've always had a caseload. Even today I have a client that I work with pretty regularly, and that keeps me attached to why I got involved to begin with.
Melissa: Right. And the work you're doing.
Brent: So that was one very impressionable experience. Another one recently is we have a gentleman here that he was in the state penitentiary. So we're not talking a jail, county jail. We're talking the state penitentiary suffered from a form of gigantism. So a very large boned, large just human being. And so anybody that would see him, he got his upbringing, and I actually have since met his mother. He got involved in gang violence when he was really young. And because he was so large, he was an intimidating figure. And he used that to his advantage to bully and to get his way. Right. That led to him going to prison and spending significant time there. And after he got out, he had some kind of an accident. I don't know if it was a bicycle accident or something. And anyways, from the accident, he realized, wait a second, I am flawed in my thinking. What am I doing? But he felt trapped. He felt like, there's nowhere I can go. There's no salvation for me. There's no turning back from this lifestyle. He was very suicidal, and we met him, pulled him in. Our case managers were really good about developing a relationship with him. He got involved in case management first, got involved in some learning, realizing some of his thinking errors that he had. And of course, he had been exposed to this when he was in prison. There were opportunities for him to be aware of some of this while he was in jail. He never took the advantage. He just wasn't in the right mindset at the time.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: And anyways, if you were to see him today, he's working. He is a gentle Ben. If you were to ever visit him, you'd go, he is just such a softie, and he's so respectful. He's taken advantage of the opportunities for growth in his life. He's taken accountability for his past decisions. And you just never know. Right. I remember we had a client that two daughters were raised by a family in Springville, and pretty much they had to go to the bathroom, know their power was rarely on in their house. Dad was a meth addict, mom was a blackout drunk, and they ran away together, these two sisters, in their teenage years, and then came back to Utah county. One became a meth addict, and one became a blackout drunk. And both of them today are sober.
Melissa: Wow.
Brent: Was it day one? Was it year two? Was it year three? No, it was down the road. So for the sister, Susan, she went back to school, and her precipitous moment of change was when she started seeing one of her children going down the path of addiction. And she said, I've got to stop the cycle. She decided she was going to stop the cycle. Came into our dental program, had her teeth redone as soon as she got her dentures and everything. She had employment within three weeks after having looked for work earnestly for three years.
Melissa: Wow.
Brent: Because of her meth mouth, wouldn't hire her. She went back to school, and she's doing great. Her sister, who I thought would never, ever be sober, has now been eight years sober.
Melissa: Wow.
Brent: So you just never know where that entry point is and where that entry point or that catalyst of change may come.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: Sometimes it may be the first try, sometimes it may be the third, the fifth, the 10th. I just know that when we put it in perspective of if we bring God into the equation, that these are children of God, and, yes, we can't minimize their choices or their decisions, and we do have to hold boundaries, and we do that here at the coalition as well. We suspend people all the time for other things. But in that suspending of services or holding boundaries, we're also teaching them how to come back when they're ready anyway. So I think it's a testament to the human spirit that we see these kinds of situations happen, and it's a testimony to them, and it's a testimony to the system, and it's a testimony to, I think, just those God alienable, built in resiliency of the human spirit that we can achieve these kinds of results.
Melissa: And to not discount that it might be that fifth or 6th chance, but that's why you're there when they're ready to take it.
Brent: Like I said, we firmly believe in holding boundaries, and we do. Just this morning, we had to hold a boundary with a client and just said, look, we're here for you, but this is a boundary we're holding, and we're holding it because we love you.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: You can throw an adult tantrum, or you can be upset, or you can be mad, or you can call me every name in the book. It's not going to matter. We know that this is the path forward, and we're here for you when you're ready.
Melissa: When you're ready. Yeah. As you shared all of those stories, even beginning with your own story, I just kept thinking that all of us have that experience where we need to have a change of mind or a change of heart. That is a universal human experience. And how fortunate it is that we do get to do that and that there are people in our lives or even organizations that are there when we're ready to have that change of heart, to teach us and guide us and lead the way. And for you, it was your client that taught you that. And for those that you work with, it's your organization or others, they may meet through it, but that's a human experience all of us have to go through in various different ways. So I love that you shared all of those stories.
Brent: Yeah, I kind of look at it like a highway analogy. Right? We're all on the freeway together. Some people are getting off this exit or just getting on. Some people are in the slow lane. Some are in the fast lane. Occasionally you got somebody going the completely wrong direction. Sometimes we have patience with our sojourners. Sometimes we don't.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: My wife will probably. That's one of her pet peeves with me. I'm very impatient with my fellow drivers sometimes. That's one of my weaknesses.
Melissa: Right. We're all on that same journey, and we get to give ourselves and others grace along the way. That's a great message. Well, I would just love to have you share. We have a lot of local listeners, so if you want to share ways anyone might be interested in being involved with the food and Care coalition, to share those. And then we also have a lot of listeners that are out of Utah. So if you just want to give any advice in general for someone that's wanting to serve or help with the homeless population as well.
Brent: Yeah, I would say, first off, don't be afraid. You have to be conscientious. You have to be aware. We have boundaries as an organization in terms of your service. We don't want you to be giving out your personal addresses and phone numbers and giving money and those kinds of things necessarily directly to the clientele. But if you want to get involved, there's opportunities. If you're out of state or out of Utah county here, there's plenty of organizations that would love to have your help and just realize that you can potentially be that difference maker. I didn't mention, but one of the clients that we had been working with and trying to get into rehab for drug rehabilitation, we had had many conversations with. But it wasn't until he sat down in a chair with a dental hygienist and she explained to him, look, I would love to work on your teeth, but I can't until this addiction issue is addressed. And it was that conversation that led to him getting into rehab and not from our agency or a case manager. Right? So it takes a village. And then for those that want to get involved locally, the food and Care coalition, we do have a certain bandwidth in terms of how many volunteers we can take, but we always encourage you to call and to check in. If you email volunteer@foodandcare.org that is our volunteer coordinator's email address. Again, that's volunteer@foodandcare.org Anna is her name and she will do her best to get you in and scheduled for some on site service, but there's a lot of off site service that you can do that benefits the agency year round. And so we have on our website, which is just ww dot foodandcare.org. Again, ww dot foodandcare.org. If you go to the donate tab at the top of the page, there'll either be a cash option, which we always appreciate, cash contributions, obviously, because that's how we operate. We're almost 90% community funded as opposed to state, federal, or government funding. And then we also have an in kind current needs list. So if you click on the in kind, there'll be a hot link in the paragraph there that says current needs. We update that about every week or two, and so that will include things that we go through every day, like laundry detergent and toilet paper and things of that nature. Versus food. Well, we may be out of butter, or we may be out of breakfast foods, or we may be in need of sack lunches because we've got a cleaning project or some kitchen equipment that needs to be repaired. So we have to shut down for a meal and provide sack lunches instead. There's all kinds of opportunities listed there and ideas for people to get involved. I've got, for example, the BYU football team is going to be coming in over the months, over several weeks in the month of January and February to do some mill service as well as some game nights with our clients. And so it's an opportunity for our clients to meet some people from the local collegiate football team, and it's an opportunity for those athletes to understand the issues of homelessness a little better. There's opportunities year round, and that's what I would suggest. And probably one thing I would like the viewer to know, or listener to know, is that this is a year round need. We just came off of Christmas and people were generous through Christmas to donate clothing and hats and things of that nature and hygiene product. But those are things that we consume every day of the year throughout the whole entire year.
Melissa: Right.
Brent: Just check in with us on occasion. Do a drive in your neighborhood or with your church or with your business or with your family or. I remember a kid coming in with his mom about right after we opened this facility back in 2009, I think it was 2009, actually walked in after having watched a homeless segment on KSL news, and he went to his mom and said, hey, I want to go out and help. And his mom kind of swept it under the rug and just ignored him. And then one day they showed up on our back doorstep and said, he completely ignored me. He got his little red wagon and this is what he collected. She's in tears and came in from air to air. And it's not the largest donation we're ever going to receive. But that's not the point. The point was he felt a need to help. He went out and collected, I think, a bag or two of clothes. He got like ten or 15 pounds of food in the neighborhood and like eight or $9 in change. And it was all in coins. And he brought it in as a donation. And I thought, here's the widow's Mike.
Melissa: Yeah, that's great.
Brent: Anyways. And all of us, as charities, I would speak for all of us. We are eternally grateful to live in the community that we do, because I think our community does have the cultural and spiritual and philanthropic mindset to alleviate the needs and suffering of others. If they just knew how.
Melissa: Yes, and I'm, as a member of the community, thankful for organizations that are doing those efforts. So that, as you said, when that desire is there, I know where I can put it to help. So that's great. Well, I will put links to all of those. The email and website you mentioned in the podcast show notes. And I just want to thank you again, Brent, for being willing to come on the show today to explain a little bit about what you do, but also educate the rest of us about the good that we can do as well. So thank you so much.
Brent: Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity, and it was great to have that connection back in the day when you came in as an.
Melissa: Yep. Very many years ago as a college student. It's a good experience.
Brent: Well, thank you so much and appreciate the listeners time.
Melissa: That was my interview with Brent Crane, the executive director of the Food and Care Coalition in Provo, Utah. And I think it's amazing that he has 35 years of experience working in this capacity and with the Food and Care Coalition. So I so appreciate him coming on to share his expertise, his experiences, his stories as he has worked and served in this area for many years. I really loved hearing at the beginning how the Food and Care Coalition was truly started as a grassroots movement from a need that needed to be fulfilled in the community. And I liked how he continued to share about there's so many collaborative partnerships that they have that as nonprofits, they're not in competition with each other. They're focusing on the strengths that they have and coming together to fulfill their overlapping missions and serve the community in the best way that each of them can, individually and together. And then finally, those stories that he shared and the reminder that you just never really know when someone is ready and needs that hand up and that ability to turn somewhere that can help them, give them the purpose and steps that they need to learn and to move forward. And I loved that reminder too, that there are so many different ways that we can volunteer if you're interested in serving in that way. He mentioned all those ways at his own organization or if you do not live here locally at other organizations, ways that you can serve and help. And finally, that story at the end, he shared of that little boy that felt the need and wanted to help and just did it. Isn't that a great example for all of us, that we can just do it when we have that desire within us to help? And I know he is not the first nonprofit organization that has mentioned that every little bit truly does help. We don't have to worry about how much it may be or the small amount of time we might have. All of it matters and makes a difference. So I will leave links to his website and to that email to volunteer if you live here locally and would like to do that. And also, I would just like to remind you that if you enjoyed this episode, if you appreciated some of the good things that you learned and the stories that you heard, please share it with someone and let them know this is an episode they can listen to to learn about this topic. Thank you so much for being here. I'll see you next time.