April 13–WINTER HAVEN — Someone making a list of social-activist groups probably wouldn’t put hunters high on that list, if at all.
Caitlin Meadows of Winter Haven with her husband, Chad, is looking to change that perception through a new social service organization, Wild Game Food Bank, whose motto is “Hunters on a Mission.”
That mission is providing other charitable organizations that feed the needy with meat from wild game, such as deer, turkeys and wild hogs, donated by local hunters.
“Turn your passion for hunting into a passion for helping others,” says a Wild Game brochure. It’s already found some pretty passionate hunters.
“It’s nice to see people taking care of people here,” said Ken Jolly, 48, of Winter Haven, a lifelong hunter who recently donated four wild hogs he shot last month with his son, Hayden, 13, and Lance Li, 15, a Chinese exchange student staying in their home. “They were really excited about making the donation.”
Since the food bank was organized late last year, it has donated about 1,200 pounds of game meat to the Mission of Winter Haven, Caitlin Meadows said. So far, the mission has been Wild Game’s only client.
“The timing was impeccable. We were in need of getting meat,” said David Berry, the Mission’s executive pastor. “We’ve had wild game almost every week since the beginning of the year.”
The Mission feeds 250 to 300 people at daily brunches and dinners and distributes growers to another 30 or 40 needy families every day, Berry said.
Donors usually give canned goods and other nonperishable items but not often meat, he said. The Mission was sometimes forced to use cash donations to buy meat.
Since Wild Game donations began arriving in January, the Mission has not had to spend any money on meat purchase, Berry said.
“Most of the families we see, this is the only food they get. Now we get good quality, lean meat that provides a nutritious meal,” he said.
A Gainesville native, Caitlin Meadows, 26, never hunted until she met Chad in 2006, she said. Chad, 30, grew up in Winter Haven and has hunted since he was a child.
The couple married in 2010, and hunting became a regular shared activity, said Caitlin Meadows, marketing coordinator at Crosby Associates Inc., a Winter Haven auction company. Deer, wild hogs and turkeys were the usual prey.
“It was fun to participate in something he’s so passionate about,” she said.
Caitlin Meadows said she began noticing hunters leaving dead animals in the field or taking only the heads for trophies. The couple themselves would eat only some of the game they killed and gave away most of it to family and friends.
When she learned about the Mission from a relative last year, “a light bulb went on in my head,” Meadows said. She researched starting a food bank and created a Facebook page, www.facebook.com/WildGameFoodBank, in November, when it also made its first donation.
Jolly said he learned about the group through Facebook. The word has spread through the close-knit Central Florida hunting community, Meadows said, and about a dozen hunters have made contributions so far.
That includes the Lightsey family, owners of the Lightsey Cattle Co. in Lake Wales, which owns Brahma Island on Lake Kissimmee. The Lightseys sponsored a March 14 hunt that bagged 10 deer, resulting in a donation of 200 pounds of meat.
That raised the Lightseys’ total donation this year to 500 pounds of game meat, Meadows said.
Wild Game also attracted the interest of Baxter Troutman, the former state legislator from Winter Haven who owns Chop-N-Block Processed Meats, which specializes in butchering wild game. Troutman gives the food bank a discount on processing its donations.
“We fully support what they’re doing. It’s a great cause for the community,” Troutman said.
Meadows said she hopes to expand Wild Game into other counties across Central Florida by setting up similar arrangements with local hunters and meat processors. She’s also working on expanding to supply other Polk County food charities.
Wild Game accepts donations to finance its work and has raised more than $1,000 so far, she said. It’s working on getting federal tax status as a charitable organization so donations will be tax free.
“As long as I have the manpower to make it happen, I want to do it,” she said. “I never thought my passion in life would be meat, but this has really turned into something neither Chad and I thought would become this big.”
[ Kevin Bouffard can be reached at [email protected] or at 863-401-6980. Read more on Florida citrus on his Facebook page, Florida Citrus Witness, http://bit.ly/baxWuU. ]