Op-ed by Garrett Dolan, Ph.D. Senior Manager, Corporate Social Responsibility Tyson Foods

The provision of child care influences who is available to work, when a person is able to work, where they can work, and especially, why they work.

In Arkansas and across the nation, there are very few affordable care options available. The annual cost of tuition exceeds $10,000 per child. Not to mention, it costs over $4 million to build a new licensed facility. These costs far exceed what a working family can afford and are the primary reasons why there is limited availability.

Running parallel to the child care shortage is an “intense and growing shortage” in labor participation. Tyson Foods experiences this problem with fewer candidates being able to work, higher rates of turnover and increases in absenteeism. Child care is one of the top reasons why these trends are deepening.

Collectively, we have a real opportunity to improve our state’s future if we aggressively address child care together. With smart investments, we can expand the labor pool, reduce reliance on government welfare, and increase school readiness for children. It requires transformational thinking with the supply of governmental incentives especially related to the cost barriers of building new facilities and paying tuition. Parents need tuition subsidies that are realistic and sufficient enough for them to choose to go back to work.

At Tyson Foods, we are working hard to figure out our company’s role in addressing child care and doing more to serve the communities where our team members live and work. We strive to be the most sought-after place to work and ensure team members have the tools and resources they need to be successful. We have piloted two on-site child care programs in Texas and Tennessee to help us learn more. Meanwhile, it is Arkansas where we call home and employ more than 20,000 team members.

Let’s join together and move with purpose to bring about the systemic changes needed.

For many rural communities, the school district serves as the economic, cultural, and social hub of the town. Pea Ridge School District — also referred to as Pea Ridge School Community — has adopted a community-focused model that meets the needs of all Pea Ridge residents, not just the students.

The Northwest Arkansas town can be considered a “bedroom community,” as most of its residents travel south to Bentonville and other nearby cities to work. The school district is Pea Ridge’s largest employer and enrolls 2,496 students in pre-K through 12th grade.

Assistant superintendent Anne Martfeld has a 25-year career in education and began working in the Pea Ridge School District four years ago. At the time, the district was beginning construction on its new high school building. The new construction — combined with a grant from the Walton Family Foundation — served as a blank slate for the district, allowing Pea Ridge School District to explore how they could use the new facility to meet the needs of the community while integrating an innovative learning opportunity for students. Community Clinic Pea Ridge became the foundation of the district’s community-centered model.

“We partnered with Community Clinic to have a school-based health center in the high school which would be adjacent to the medical care professions classroom,” Martfeld said. “Our grant from the Walton Family Foundation helped us think about the connection of community and school and how we as a district could serve our community in a holistic way.”

Community Clinic Pea Ridge offers primary and acute care, basic lab tests, wellness checks, immunizations, sports physicals, return-to-play care, and other services to the community of Pea Ridge and the surrounding area.

In addition to being open to the entire community, Community Clinic Pea Ridge offers a shuttle for students. This transportation option allows children to get sports physicals, wellness exams, and other routine health care services without their parents or caregivers having to miss several hours of work to get them to and from appointments in Bentonville.

The clinic served as a launch pad for Pea Ridge School District to build additional inclusive spaces that provide students with real-world experiences while meeting a community need. Alex Jackson is the special projects coordinator for the district and oversees the clinic and other community initiatives, including The Blackhawk Pantry.

Every Thursday morning, The Blackhawk Pantry is open to students, families, faculty, and community members to pick out kid-friendly meals, fresh produce, protein, and other resources at no cost. To date, the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank has donated more than 25,000 pounds of food to the initiative.

“Our district social worker, Amanda Shackelford, wanted to have a closet where students could access food,” Jackson said. “I am known for going big, so we cleared out our old records room and essentially created a free grocery store.”

Since opening in February 2022, The Blackhawk Pantry has served an average of 100 people per week, totaling more than 3,800 visits. Jackson wants to ensure the pantry is available to anyone who needs it and simplifies the process of meeting families’ needs by minimizing asks of patrons. Students in the district make up 40% of visits.

The Blackhawk Pantry also serves as a resource center in partnership with the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank and Community Clinic where experts on social services program are on-site and available to answer any questions.

“To me, having a community-centered school involves all of those pieces working together to make it successful,” Jackson said. “And that comes from having strong relationships with our students, our teachers, and our external and internal stakeholders.

“When people from the community step foot on our campus, we want them to be able to envision themselves as being a part of our community school.”

Undrea “Gem” Jones was released from prison after 21 and a half years on Feb. 26, 2019. She always knew she would go back in — but as a volunteer for the Storybook Project of Arkansas. She wants to be a part of helping parents and grandparents form and foster bonds with the children in their lives the way volunteers helped her.

“It was a momentous event for me because it was coming full circle,” she said. “That was a whole experience that I had been waiting to have for a very long time.”

Jones was sent to prison for a crime she committed at the age of 16. Her son was 2 years old. The Storybook Project of Arkansas, a nonprofit prison outreach that allows volunteers to record inmates reading to their children, was already underway at the Arkansas Department of Corrections-McPherson Unit when she arrived.

Experts, like those from the American Academy of Pediatrics, point out that reading to children not only boosts their language skills, it also strengthens their relationships with their parents.

Books have seen Jones through some of the hardest times in her life, including her own childhood.

“I love books. I excelled in academia,” she said. “There was a lot of trauma that I was dealing with at that time, and books were a safe-haven for me. I read anything that transported me from my present circumstances.”

She couldn’t physically pull her son onto her lap and snuggle him for reading time while she was in prison, but the Storybook Project of Arkansas allowed her to give him the gift of her voice.

Jones and other volunteers from the outreach visit prisons four times a year, said Denise Chai, who leads the Arkansas program.

“We bring in a whole bunch of books, and they choose one,” said Chai. “They will write a message in the book, and then they go and sit down with a volunteer and they’re recorded, giving a message Then they read the book and give another message at the beginning. After we leave the prison, we burn that to a CD, because we’re not quite digital, and we mail the book and the CD to the child.”

Jones doesn’t remember any of the books she chose to read to her son.

“I don’t remember the books because you’re going through so much in the process at that moment,” she said. “It’s amazing, but it’s also really difficult because you want to say so much to your child, but at the same time you want to hold it together and send love and encouragement, and you’re holding a broken heart because you can’t be there. You would have to prepare yourself so you would not be overcome with just the gratitude and appreciation and broken-heartedness — and get through it.”

Choosing books to share with him, however, was simple. “I heard another volunteer say we had so many different, beautiful books, and she said, ‘How do they choose which book they want to read?’” said Jones. “I said, ‘The book chooses us.’ During the whole process as my child grew older, I found a book always picked me for what I was going to read to him.”

She remembers asking him to read a book about Puerto Rican evangelist Nicky Cruz when he was old enough, and to let her know what he thought of it. She didn’t read the book to him, but he did write a report to share his thoughts when he finished on his own.

“He had the foundation of reading from the storybooks that I sent him,” she said.

That book, like others they shared during her sentence, created common ground for them, helping foster a bond that can be lost when parents and children are separated for long periods.

Jones considers herself lucky because some of the people she met in prison didn’t have custody of or contact with their children; her son was in the care of family, and they made sure he heard about her and that she saw him when possible. The recordings he received of her reading to him linked them while they were apart, sometimes serving as conversation starters when they could be together.

She hasn’t discussed the Storybook Project with her son and won’t hazard a guess about what it might have meant to him. She is a proud mom, though.

“My son has a love of academia, and he went to college on an academic scholarship. He loves knowledge,” she said. “He is career-focused, and he’s in a committed relationship. He has never been touched by the criminal justice system. He is an awesome man.”

The Storybook Project, she said, helped her be a better mother.

“It wasn’t just about reading a book or sending a book or recording to our child,” she said. “To us, it’s everything. We get to send a piece of ourselves to our children, some of them we haven’t ever seen, some of them we haven’t seen in years or months,” she said. “That one moment that we got the opportunity to be a normal parent was —– is — just something that is priceless.”

We often hear from our  fundholders that one of the reasons they love working with the Community Foundation is because the foundation is truly the community’s foundation. Whether a family has established a multi-million dollar field-of-interest fund or a donor advised fund to organize a few thousands of dollars of annual charitable gifts, the family knows that they have full access to the Community Foundation’s charitable giving expertise and deep knowledge of the needs in our region.

This is part of the reason we find it so heartwarming to see a focus on altruism appear in the mainstream media. When people from all walks of life can share in the joy of philanthropy, everyone wins. 

Here are a handful of stories we’ve particularly enjoyed that are worth checking out if you happened to miss them.

–Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, and his family have just given their ownership of the company to charity by establishing a group of trusts and nonprofits.

–Here in Arkansas, our very own Dr. Omar Atiq made news when he forgave thousands of dollars of medical debt.

–And business leaders aren’t the only people who are increasingly publicizing their charitable giving commitments. More celebrities are sharing their stories of charitable passion, too.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on these and other stories as philanthropy pops up in your news feed. The community foundation is here to answer your questions and provide the tools you need to activate your charitable intentions in a concrete, meaningful, and tax-savvy way. 

Bear markets aren’t much fun for anyone. But that doesn’t mean your charitable giving commitments have to be put on hold. If you are like many donors, you are still looking for ways to support the organizations you care about that rely on your support to achieve their missions.

Remember, not every stock is down. It’s still incredibly tax-efficient to donate highly-appreciated stock to your fund at the Community Foundation. When you give appreciated stock held for more than one year (a long-term capital asset) to your donor-advised or other type of fund, instead of selling it outright, the capital gains tax is avoided. Plus, marketable securities are typically deductible at their fair market value, further helping your overall income tax situation.

Don’t forget about the Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD), either. If you’ve reached the age of 70 ½, the QCD is an elegant and effective planning tool. You are still required to take Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your IRA even in a down market, but the QCD can help offset this tax hit by allowing you to direct up to $100,000 to a qualified public charity, including a field-of-interest fund or unrestricted fund at the Community Foundation. 

This is also a good time to make sure your estate plan is in good shape, including bequests you may wish to leave to a fund at the Community Foundation so that the causes you care about can continue to be supported for generations to come. A bequest by way of a qualified retirement plan beneficiary designation is an especially effective tool to support your charitable intentions after you are gone. That’s because funds flowing directly to a fund at the Community Foundation from a retirement plan after your death will not be subject to either income tax or estate tax. 

Please reach out to our Development team at Arkansas Community Foundation.  We are here to help!