ROGERS, Ark. — The Samaritan Community Center in Rogers is reporting that demand is surging, and that a few specific factors are to blame.
Inflation causing food and housing costs to rise and the Memorial Day weekend tornadoes that struck Northwest Arkansas are two of the big reasons attributed to the increase in demand. The other is that the nonprofit is now operating out of a more accessible location in a populated area in Rogers.
The Samaritan Community Center is serving 56% more families from when they first opened the center in September 2023, according to the nonprofit's leaders.
"We provide wraparound services that encompass so many things, health, hunger and hope for people. So we're feeding people through our cafe with fantastic food and giving away groceries that people choose themselves," said Chris Koerner, Director of Program Operations for Samaritan Community Center. "We've got our dental clinic, our counseling clinic, and we do snack packs for kids. We've got our care advocates, who are unlocking resources for people."
Their new space, which is about 28,000 square feet, has allowed them to explore new programs. They say it's better serving the community.
"Our new space has been serving our community so much better because it is so open and people just feel so cherished by being here," Koerner said.
Koerner said they saw a significant amount of people come for help after the tornados impacted them and stay for the rest of the resources they provide.
"People were facing such uncertainty. So we can be a place that provides certainty," Koerner explained. [Once] the tornado hit, we were seeing 41 first time families. We had 210 first time families in the first three or four weeks, and a lot of those families have stayed because they're still in hard shape."
He said the influx of people isn't weighing them down but fueling their mission to help even more.
"We had to get creative with things. But we're still handing out as much food as we can. We're still doing the same quality of meals that we can, and we thankfully, we have so many fantastic volunteers at a time like that," Koerner said. "Because that 56% increase in people that we're serving comes with a commensurate cost of increase."
One of the ways they were impacted was through the Samaritan Shop, which is a thrift store that helps fund one third of the organizations mission. Their Rogers location was significantly damaged from the storms. They closed for 12 weeks and finally reopened Aug. 18.
"All of our AC units were ripped off the roof, which left great big gaping holes in the roof, which caused rain damage to fall through all of these drop ceiling tiles," said Amanda Bond, Director of Retail Operations. "It was awful. So I'm so glad to look at it now and to see where we've come in just 12 weeks, versus what it looks like that night"
"We were 12 weeks without one of our single biggest sources of revenue while all this is going on. And we had our shop people heroic effort to get that shop reopened, because it's such a source of revenue for us," Koerner added.
Bond said it was weeks of long and hard clean-up, but it was worth it to get the store back up and running.
"We know what our sales in the stores support through our community outreach. And so without those sales there, we're not able to do that community outreach," Bond said. "That first day we had, we had probably 200 people lined up outside waiting to come in at 10 o'clock when we opened."
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