Jackson Free Press

Mayoung McClendon is a charitable Wonder Woman.

McClendon, 51, who runs the South Rankin Food Resource Center in Richland, Miss., would not claim that title, but it's obvious to anyone who spends time with her.

She founded the food pantry in 2005 with her daughter Kristin, 31. "We were volunteers at the shelter for Hurricane Katrina," she says. "When we left, Kristin had such a passion for trying to feed the hunger that we asked the church if we could it as a ministry through our church (First United Methodist of Richland), and they gave us the green light."

In 2008, they moved the food resource center from an eight-foot by 10-foot closet in the church to a parsonage on the church property. The building looks big on the outside, but it's tiny on the inside, with three small rooms that house the food, a walk-in cooler, and a narrow hallway that barely houses the thousands of clients they receive each month.

"It's chaos, but it's controlled chaos," McClendon says. "We know what we're doing. Everybody has a job and everybody does it, and that's the way this wheel turns. It's not just one individual. It takes every volunteer I have to make this wheel turn."

SRFRC works off a small budget. Their funding and food comes from donations and fundraisers, though they have people who donate to the pantry by paying certain bills and helping with other areas to keep the pantry running. Their clients range anywhere from middle class families struggling to make ends meet to poor families who cannot work.

Kristin has a severe seizure disorder, something that happened after she had an adverse reaction to a PT shot at six months old. With her 30th birthday last April, SRFRC did their annual Birthday Wish for her. They collected cans and quarters for each day in Kristin and Mayoung's lives, calculated at 10,950. They ended up collecting a little more than 11,000.

This year, the total days ended up being 11,315. The pantry held their second annual "community birthday" for Kristin's 31st on April 19 at the Richland Community Center, complete with music from Texas band Southern Justice. They raised more than 17,000 cans and well exceeded the monetary donation goal.

From her daughter's love for "feeding the hunger" as she called it, Mayong said that she found her true calling.

"She motivates me because she sees no bad in anything and for her wanting to help everybody, I feel like it makes me a better person because I want to help her accomplish her goals," McClendon says. "And it is a blessing. This is a very rewarding business. I feel like I'm blessed tenfold by what we do. I think that we'll probably do it until we just can't do it anymore."