Compassion ‘floored’ by the compassionate
That new floor was donated by David’s Abbey Carpet & Floors, 10853 Kingston Pike in Farragut.
“I just thought it was pretty neat,” she said. “They’re hometown and we’re hometown.”
“We had this ugly floor, and I kept painting it, and it would just peel up,” Rolland added. “It had gotten to the point you couldn’t mop it; or if you mopped it or swept it, the concrete paint just kept peeling up.”
So she got estimates on the cost of flooring: “it was a lot.
“We could feed people or we could buy a floor,” Rolland added.
She approached Second Harvest Food Bank about anyone who would give a discount on the flooring, which in turn, told her David’s Abbey Carpet “said they would donate the material for you all.”
She talked to representatives of the store and they showed what they could donate.
“You can see (that) this is beautiful,” Rolland said. “It matches the floor in our hall of the church. They didn’t just give me a second-hand thing; they gave me a beautiful floor.
“Now, we’re just ready to get going,” she added.
Compassion Ministries has a “local” food pantry that serves Knox, Loudon, Roane and Anderson counties.
“We have a pantry here every other Thursday, from 2 to 4 p.m., Rolland said. “We’ll service anybody.
“We do four outreaches a week, alongside Cedar Brook Ministries,” she added. “It takes food into four different low-income housing developments and sets up a pop-up pantry and feeds the people in those areas.
“(Cedar Brook) works alongside other churches.”
However, Compassion’s biggest reach is through a mobile food pantry partnership with Second Harvest that serves remote Appalachian areas in Tennessee.
The organization opened in 2010, initially in a closet as an outreach of Cornerstone Church “just to feed the people just right around here,” Rolland recalled.
An elderly gentleman approached Rolland and told her he wanted her to start a food ministry, and he funded it.
“We would have people bring us food from the congregation to stock it,” she said. “Then we latched in with Second Harvest Food Bank (about 13 years ago) … (that) has been a tremendous blessing. We became an agency of theirs.”
In subsequent discussions with Second Harvest, they agreed there was a greater need in other places, particularly in Appalachian counties.
“At that time, they were developing a mobile pantry,” Rolland said. “They asked if I was interested in that. I said ‘yeah.’”
She bought the truck and Second Harvest’s people drove the truck to locations, then picked it up. Its first location was at Elk Valley Elementary School in Campbell County.
“We fed about 163 people (on that trip),” Rolland said. “We thought, ‘this is good to get out there.’”
Compassion Ministries did about four trips a year.
“That’s all we could afford at that time,” Rollard added.
As the years went by, she added Claiborne County and other counties.
Also, “the Lord gave us a freezer truck” so it could deliver meat into the mountains,” with Second Harvest providing the meat, Rolland said.
“So the relationship between us and Second Harvest just kept developing,” she added.
“As the years went by, we started doing 10 to 12 (mobile pantry trips) a year. Compassion Ministries “has grown into about 42 pallets of food, and the retail value on these trucks, when we go into the mountains, is anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000.”
They have grown “from 50 families, to now we go in prepared to serve 500 families, which is … 2,000-plus people,” Rolland said.
“We go into remote areas of the Appalachian Mountains: Fentress, Claiborne, Campbell, Grainger, Anderson, Jefferson, Cocke and Monroe, counties — anywhere except Knoxville,” she added. “We take in freezer food, canned goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, bread, eggs — just about everything you can think of that a grocery store would have and it’s free of charge.”
Also traveling with the food truck is a medical trailer from Walgreens, whose volunteers provide vaccines.
