By Zach Gonzalez–
MUNCIE, IN–Yolanda Velez moved to Muncie to watch over her six-year-old granddaughter while Velez’s daughter, a single mother, studied at Ball State. Velez stayed in Muncie long after her daughter moved to Louisville, Kentucky because she found people to be with once her family was away.
Velez, who generally goes by the nickname “Yo,” plugged herself into various communities across Muncie, as she found a church to attend and volunteered at locations like Muncie Mission and Second Harvest Food Bank.
“I’m close into the community. I may not have a blood family here, but I have a Muncie family,” Velez said.
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Velez started volunteering at a non-profit food drive called Feed My Sheep last year, which provides food on Thanksgiving Day to people unable to afford it. Despite still adjusting to her role as a planning committee member, gathering with fellow Muncie residents and helping out the community keep her interested in volunteering.
“That’s a good idea to offer a free meal to those people who are not only homeless, but people who are very low income,” Velez said. “They don’t have the funds to put together a Thanksgiving meal because it’s not cheap anymore, so it’s a good thing to do for the community, and it tells them that they’re people, and that they’re important enough to make a meal for.”
Through Feed My Sheep, Velez established friendships with other volunteers and constantly experiences interacting with a family outside the one she’s genetically related to. Her volunteer work throughout her years living in Muncie lets her connect with community members daily.
“I know that at any given point in time, I could reach out to one of my volunteer people for help, and they’ve stepped up the same way that I would do for them. That’s what family does,” Velez said. “In my years of volunteering, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people. I see them in the store and it’s nothing for me to give them a hug and say, ‘hey how you doing.’ These are the people that I serve.”
As a volunteer who serves others, Velez said she believes in what she coined “service with a smile.”
“When I talk to somebody on the phone, I want them to become as engaged as I am and feel and hear my passion, so when I’m asking them to help out, they have that same feeling of wanting to help,” Velez said.
As a Christian, Velez said a passion to love and serve people is what God wants individuals to do, and she said it’s a gift God bestowed her with.
“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” Velez said. “Everybody needs food and what’s better than to share a meal with someone or give them food—that to me is an outward demonstration of love.”
Similar to Velez, Skylar Workman started working at Feed My Sheep last year. While searching for an internship for her Ball State advertising degree, Workman stumbled upon Feed My Sheep, and she set up her internship with the nonprofit chair Jeannine Ferrer.
Before the internship, Workman was introduced to Ferrer mainly through Workman’s mom, as she works at Northwest Bank where she ran into Ferrer a couple of times. Workman messaged Ferrer on Facebook and found a way to intern at the nonprofit.
“Kind of from the beginning, I was in there to fix the website basically,” Workman said.
Now Workman volunteers as a member of the Feed My Sheep planning committee. She stayed with Feed My Sheep after her internship ended because she thought her work mattered to the food drive and the people it served.
“I was actually helping people and even though I wasn’t with the people directly, I was still doing stuff on the sidelines,” Workman said. “I wanted to stick around because we had some things, I thought we could do better, and I wanted to make sure we did better this year.”
With experience working at Secret Families and participating in Walk A Mile In My Shoes during high school, Workman was no stranger to volunteering before her internship. Even though she doesn’t pursue volunteer opportunities, Workman enjoys the ones she’s given.
“It wasn’t stuff I had personally seeked out more, but whenever I did it, I felt like it was important and I was helping people, and I did enjoy doing it,” Workman said. “Feed My Sheep was … less of something that I had to do and more something I’m doing because it’s a good thing to do.”
Workman said she feels it’s a different experience serving on the planning committee instead of as an intern. She feels she is now more capable of expressing her perspectives to others.
“When I was an intern, you feel like you’re just kind of there to help whatever they’re doing, and don’t really get to have your own ideas,” Workman said. “This year I’ve definitely felt more comfortable sharing my own ideas.”
When she was a grad school student at Ball State, Feed My Sheep Chair Jeannine Ferrer was assigned to cover a story for the Star Press about a mega church and ran into a couple known as George and Teresa Huggins. She found out they ran a nonprofit specializing in providing food to members of the Muncie community called Feed My Sheep.
Despite covering the nonprofit and appreciating its mission, Ferrer was more concerned with her education and job as a reporter at the time.
“As a college student, I guess you just get caught up in what you’re doing sometimes, and you forget that there’s a world around you,” Ferrer said. “It really touched my heart because I grew up very poor.”
Ferrer comes from a family of 15 children including herself, so she relates to those struggling to afford food in Muncie. After realizing she understood the experiences of the people Feed My Sheep serves, she volunteered and eventually became chair of the nonprofit after the Huggins couple retired and previous chairs before Ferrer quit.
“I know what that feels like—of having to eat things that you didn’t like just because that was all we had in the house,” Ferrer said. “I remember the days when I was a student at Ball State not having a mind to serve other people, but it’s become a linchpin. Service has become a linchpin in my life.”
Ferrer graduated from Ball State with an undergraduate degree in journalism and looked to complete grad school, but she adopted her younger cousins after their mom died and never went back to finish. This made volunteer work easier for Ferrer who said her eyes were opened to how much of an issue food insecurity is in Delaware County.
“The Bible says we will always have the poor with us, and it’s true—everybody can’t be part of the working sector of our society,” Ferrer said. “There’s always time to come in and help those people, whether it’s clothing, education, food, shelter, or more.”
Feed My Sheep is in its 29th annual year serving the Muncie community. With the nonprofit soon reaching its 30th anniversary, Ferrer appreciates every ounce of help people give to Feed My Sheep’s cause.
“We’re the largest one-day service event to feed people in the city. So by doing this for 30 years, God has just blessed us to be able to have some good people,” Ferrer said.
Zach Gonzalez is a Ball State Journalism student who is interning with Feed My Sheep.