A Bite Out of Childhood Poverty

Carroll County volunteers recruited the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile to visit Eureka Springs to provide dental care at no cost to the families of kids in need.

If left untreated, a small cavity can grow into a searing toothache that distracts you from your schoolwork and makes it painful to eat. Tooth decay and discoloration can make you a target for unkind words and stares.

This summer, a group of Carroll County volunteers campaigned to bring the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile, for which Arkansas Children’s Hospital serves as the clinical service provider, to Eureka Springs Elementary School to put smiles back on the faces of a few dozen local kids in need of dental treatment.

You’ve never seen a happier dental clinic: shiny new instruments, sparkling white surfaces, colorful cartoon decals on the walls, children’s movies playing on televisions mounted above each dental chair. As the kids climbed the steps into the Care Mobile and were greeted by a smiling dentist and dental assistant, their curiosity about this unusual clinic on a bus melted their apprehension.

Recruiting the Care Mobile to visit Eureka Springs was a tangible sign of progress from a brand new Carroll County group working to address childhood poverty. Originating with a group of board members at ARCF’s Carroll County Community Foundation (CCCF) local office, CLIP (Children Living in Promise) emerged when a report published by the University of Arkansas in 2008 revealed some troubling figures for Carroll County.

“The study indicated that 35 percent of the families in Carroll County lived at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, and more than 20 percent of our children were living in poverty,” said CCCF Executive Director Glenn Williams. As one of the sponsors of the study, CCCF organized several meetings to bring community leaders together to discuss how they could partner to address this need.

“We thought we’d be lucky if four or five of the people we invited showed up for the first meeting,” said Williams. “I think 27 actually showed up.” At the next meeting, 31 people came. The conversations ranged from foster parenting to mental healthcare for teens to the lack of transportation to get children to the services they need.

“We realized that the service providers are so busy with their frontline jobs that they don’t have very much time to come together to communicate with each other, and sometimes even they don’t know who is providing what services out there,” explained CCCF Board Chair Sharon Spurlin.

“…35 percent of the families in Carroll County lived at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, and more than 20 percent of our children were living in poverty…”

The Care Mobile is a partnership between Ronald McDonald House Charities of Arkoma, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, Delta Dental of Arkansas and Tyson Foods Inc. It is one of 41 Ronald McDonald Care Mobiles in six different countries delivering “hope on wheels” to children.

The group recognized that before they could move forward, they needed to take stock of where things currently stood. “We didn’t know what specific issues we were going to try to tackle, and we didn’t want to duplicate resources that were already there,” noted Williams.

As they worked on creating a guide to Carroll County services for children and families, they began to look for small ways to start taking action. They learned that because of a lack of foster families in the county, local children had to be sent to homes in other counties far from their schools, friends and relatives. So CLIP members hung signs, sent press releases and began inviting people to attend interest meetings about foster care. Five families attended the first meeting, even more attended the next one and the buzz has continued to grow.

Next, they learned about the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile and determined to bring those services to their community. Now they’re beginning to seek larger, systemic ways to take action by examining their community’s transportation needs and building partnerships among government and nonprofit service providers.

Members of the CLIP committee agree that if they’re going to create meaningful change for children in Carroll County, everyone has to work together. “We’ve never intended for this to be the community foundation’s project alone,” said Sharon Spurlin. “We wanted to initiate a countywide discussion.”