After School Special

Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry expands its mission to aid public schools.

By Story Matt McNair Photography By Brian Chilson

Ronnie Ritter devotes a great many of his waking hours to solving the problem of hunger in Arkansas. As the current executive director of Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry, the nonprofit organization that helps to provide much-needed animal protein to the state’s food banks through donated venison, much of his time is spent conversing with volunteers across Arkansas who are working diligently to see that every Arkansan has enough food to eat on any given day, through his program or some other charity. But even with all of that day-in, day-out exposure to the realities of food insecurity, Ritter can still sound as if he’s seeing the breadth of this problem for the first time.

“You would not believe how many hungry kids are out there,” he says with wearied awe. “I couldn’t believe it, I had no idea.”

But, of course, Ritter is not seeing the breadth of this problem for the very first time. After 25 years with AHFH (16 of those as director), Ritter knows as well as anybody the immensity of Arkansas’s hunger crisis, and has probably done more to combat that crisis than any person you’re likely to meet on any given day.

Seemingly, though, the capacity for that kind of dedication comes packaged with a healthy capacity for unhappy surprise; after all, to lose one’s susceptibility to shock in the face of moral travesty is to court burnout, if not outright shack up with it. And while the hunger crisis in Arkansas — a global agricultural force, yet among the most food-insecure states in the Union — is a shameful irony and a seemingly bottomless well of righteous outrage, looking at the problem of “hungry people” through the more exacting lens of “hungry children” perhaps has a way of dipping the draw-bucket deeper yet.

Not to say that feeding hungry kids was ever not a primary goal of the AHFH mission. The organization — which facilitates the donation by Arkansas hunters of ethically harvested deer to local food banks and other hunger-relief organizations through the cooperation of independent meat processors — was always set up as a means of feeding hungry people generally, but also optimized to feed hungry families, extended families, and community networks, all of which, of course, include children. But it wasn’t until around 2017 that an AHFH brainstorming session turned to another, different charitable effort: weekend backpack programs.

Specific need

For many children growing up in food-insecure homes, even in communities where AHFH and other like-minded organizations operate, public school is the only place they are assured of a full and adequate meal. For these kids, there is no guarantee of a square meal — or even two, which you might get at school, and forget about three — when school is not in session. (Emphasis on “in session,” i.e., even during the school year there are two full days per week that many Arkansas children can’t count on getting a real meal.) Backpack programs attempt to mitigate this by sending eligible students home with a backpack containing not books, but food.

Often lacking in the backpacks, however, is true nutritional value (as opposed to merely caloric value); and of the nutritional shortcomings, the biggest gap is most likely protein. As protein is AHFH’s stock in trade, Ritter and his brainstorming partners naturally zeroed in on the protein gap. All well and good, but all that protein came in the form of burger, and one can’t very well fill up a child’s backpack with a few pounds of raw ground meat, no matter how much good the cooked version might do them.

Crucially, Ritter and his crew noticed that one of the primary means of getting some protein in those backpacks was by including as many processed meat snacks (think Slim Jims) as possible. These snack sticks — comprised of heavily processed meat, sketchily sourced — are better than nothing, but far from ideal.

“We just stumbled upon ’em,” Ritter says of the sodium-laden, preservative-saturated cholesterol accelerants hawked by Randy “Macho Man” Savage and beloved by loitering teens everywhere, figuring that if they could produce something similar in taste but locally sourced, made with more nutritious ingredients and ethically harvested, un-mysterious meat, they could get them to those very same kids and “just see if they like ’em.” 

“You would not believe how many hungry kids are out there.”

Bucks to burger, does to donations

When the idea for the snack sticks came, Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry had been a going concern for nearly 20 years and, while a lot of work, was running just about as smoothly as a nonprofit of its size could.

Several things have contributed to AHFH’s success and efficiency. First and foremost, the underlying mission is an appealing and universal one: to feed the hungry. (One doesn’t have to be religious for this mission to resonate, but it almost certainly doesn’t hurt that Arkansas is an intensely religious state.) But the way that AHFH goes about accomplishing that mission — facilitating the redistribution of harvested venison — is, while perhaps not uniquely Arkansan, nonetheless ideally suited to Arkansas and Arkansawyers.

For one thing, deer hunting is deeply ingrained in the state’s culture, and while there are plenty of folks alive and hunting today who can remember a time when just seeing a deer — much less actually killing one — conferred bragging rights and storytelling privileges, past and ongoing efforts of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and other stakeholders have resulted in a deer population that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. It’s more than enough to feed hunters and their immediate families. For another, there is something ennobling — for both giver and recipient — in charity expressed as food rather than money, and food produced, rather than purchased, by the provider. Thanks to the program’s reliance on a statewide network of independent meat processors and local food banks, hunters who donate their harvest can be confident their donation will help their own community.

That last bit is key to AHFH’s system and also sets it apart from many other charitable organizations of similar size and scope. With more than 70 local processors operating across 54 Arkansas counties, AHFH has, for all intents and purposes, a statewide presence. To anyone who has donated a harvest to the organization or benefited from its efforts, this likely seems obvious; but for the many people in the state who have done neither, nor, not having ever bought a hunting license — likely a much higher number than the average reader of Arkansas Wild presumes — ever encountered the AHFH donation option at AGFC.com, the organization might well be completely unknown. While comparable charities certainly facilitate local action, the vast majority effect good works through charitable giving alone (e.g., targeted grants), so most charitable giving to them consists of monetary donations, and necessitates a centralized infrastructure. They also, crucially, run conventional public relations campaigns, including large, public-facing fundraisers.

AHFH is different in that, while relying on monetary donations to fund operating costs, it does not distribute money, dealing only in the provision of specific food. Even in the case of that food, AHFH does not donate it so much as facilitate its collection and distribution, negotiating a set per-carcass processing fee with individual processors (all processors receive the same per-deer rate, though that rate may change from year to year) and providing each with the tools to document the donation for themselves (to be paid), AHFH (to make the payment), and the AGFC (to ensure all state game laws are followed by all parties). AHFH connects the processor with eligible local food banks — Ritter vets these organizations, though he does take suggestions for local food charities from the processor — and then largely steps aside, letting the local operators take care of their own affairs until it’s time to settle up at the end of the season.

“I don’t know and I don’t need to know,” he says of who exactly is receiving packages of AHFH-facilitated ground venison after the initial negotiation and setup with the processor, insisting that local control of the resource is key and that AHFH should not be in the business of passing out the donations. And, in an outfit that Ritter views as less an endeavor than a calling, he’s confident that everyone involved only wants to help out their neighbor, insisting he must, and does, “trust the processors to do the right thing.”

To date, those processors have done the right thing to the tune of 1.5 million pounds of ground venison, every ounce of which has gone to an Arkansas resident in need. Last season’s haul was a record 100,000 pounds; as of this writing, the 2025 hunting season is still in swing.

Good problem to have

Even though the tried-and-true AHFH policy of processing all donated venison into ground meat was a success, the example of after-school backpack programs highlighted a limitation: The meat being distributed was not shelf-stable. It had to be refrigerated and then cooked. While children certainly benefit from this system, many a hungry child is in that condition on account the adult responsible for them is unable,for whatever reason, to consistently do things like obtain raw ground meat from a food charity, store it properly, and ultimately prepare it as a meal.

Snack sticks, on the other hand, are shelf-stable. That means a hungry child can either eat that snack stick as soon as they clear the schoolhouse door or keep it in their backpack, their room or wherever else until they choose to eat it.

They taste good, too. As soon as the first batch was rolled out, Ritter knew AHFH had hit upon a special idea and a new opportunity to uniquely serve some of the state’s most vulnerable citizens: hungry children. But unlike the system in place for ground venison, which had become a well-oiled and relatively simple machine over AHFH’s existence, getting the snack sticks to the ones who needed them most presented new challenges for Ritter and his team.

The primary challenge is cost. While any local participating processor can safely and legally accept donated venison and process it for consumption, it takes a specialized facility to produce a shelf-stable snack stick that meets state and federal guidelines. And as of this writing, there is no such facility in Arkansas; the closest one is in Missouri, between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis.

Along with the obvious expense of transporting donated venison to the Missouri-based facility and then hauling the finished product back to Arkansas, there are also significant added production costs for the snack sticks, such as additional ingredients and commercial-grade packaging. Storage is a cost concern as well because the meat must remain refrigerated at the donation site until enough has been collected to fill a trailer for a run to Missouri. That last requirement alone — storage — makes it impossible for a large number of AHFH participating processors to accept harvest donations for the snack stick program.

“Processing costs are going up every year,” Ritter says while discussing the challenges of processors — small businesses that operate on thin margins and in small facilities — that, despite wishing to participate, can’t afford to commit to storing unforeseeable quantities of meat for uncertain lengths of time during peak deer season, a vital few weeks that for many local processors can make the difference between red and black ink come book-balancing time. “They just can’t do it.”

Despite the challenge snack stick production represents to AHFH and its existing partner network, the organization has been able to increase the number of sticks produced and distributed every year since its initial rollout. This success is largely attributable to a dynamic partnership between AHFH, the AGFC and several large hunting clubs throughout the state.

The AGFC, through its Deer Management Assistance Program (DMAP), has for years partnered with these large clubs — the kind of clubs with dozens and dozens of members, hundreds and hundreds of acres, and a sizable operating budget — to parlay the game management and habitat assistance offered by the agency into a collaboration with AHFH. Participating clubs — whose property is home to massive deer herds that club members generally wish to manage for trophy buck production — host special hunts each season with the sole purpose (aside from managing the herd) of donating every harvested deer to AHFH, and specifically to the snack stick program.

The AGFC helps by issuing special permits for these hunts (deer harvested and tagged under the program’s rules do not count against the tag limit included with the hunter’s standard license), and by providing an AGFC biologist qualified and equipped to perform on-site CWD testing. (Testing for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, is not required in Arkansas, though each deer harvested for snack sticks is tested before processing.) Arkansas Hunters Feeding the Hungry stations a refrigerated trailer for storage at each location, making it possible to perform every pre-shipment task — harvest, donation, registration, testing and storage — in one place.

The partnership has been a resounding success, with the meat harvested from DMAP hunts alone accounting for more than 115,000 packages of snack sticks distributed to 50 school districts in 2024, bringing the total of individual snack sticks donated to schools since the program’s inception to an estimated 600,000.

“We could give away a million pounds if we had it.”

The work continues

While the additional storage requirements and production costs associated with the snack sticks make them more difficult to fit into one of the most compelling and vital aspects of AHFH’s operation — local hunters donating their harvest to local processors for distribution in those immediate communities — Ritter has done his level best to assure that local agency is still a major part of the snack stick program. This includes efforts by local communities to secure grants funding organizations such as AHFH to participate in the local school district’s student hunger relief program, such as a grant disbursed this year to AHFH from the Pine Bluff Area Community Foundation (an affiliate of the Arkansas Community Foundation) providing enough funding for a recent delivery of snack sticks to schools in the Pine Buff school district.

While the snack stick program is what really animates Ritter in conversation (“They just love ’em,” he says of the kids who find snack sticks in their take-home backpack, “I think it’s their favorite thing”), the original strategy of providing ground deer meat — with its lower operational costs, intensely local focus and broader distribution footprint — remains just as important to Ritter and AHFH. And though the organization makes strides in participation and production every year, the hunger crisis in Arkansas persists.

“Giving it away is easy,” says Ritter. “We could give away a million pounds if we had it.”

Beyond pounds of meat, the problem — as anyone involved in any charitable mission knows — will most likely be funding, or a shortfall thereof. But with AHFH’s dynamic system of volunteers, hunters and community-minded local processors — and, crucially, financial help from working-class hunters chipping in a few bucks when buying a license each year, along with larger donations from well-coined outdoorsmen — it is perhaps not naive to think AHFH can continue to grow and further tamp out the shameful state of food insecurity in The Land of Opportunity.

“I like to partner with people with passion,” Ritter says when reflecting on the qualities of the folks involved with AHFH and those he’d like to see contributing in the future, be it through financial savvy, woodcraft, or any other means.

And that was all the reflecting he needed to do.