The Outreach Program

While on a construction mission trip to Tanzania, East Africa in 2003, Floyd Hammer and Katheryn Hamilton witnessed extreme poverty, illness, and starvation. One year later they established The Outreach Program, a 501©(3) nonprofit whose mission is to provide safe water, food, medical care and education to children and those in need at home and abroad.

To provide a future for the world's most vulnerable children and their families.

Goal One: Introduce machine-packed meals to domestic and international markets.

Goal Two: Expansion of domestic and international services to reach 2025 goals: 1: 500 school Water Point systems installed. 2: 20 new Porta Docs. 3: 10 new Children's Centers. 4: 1B meals created/delivered.

Goal Three: Build capacity of the organization to create greater impact.

Our founders identified, and are training, a young man to continue their international work, particularly in Tanzania, Africa, in regards to our mission of providing safe water, food, medicine and education. Through training with their business acumen combined with leveraging their significant international network, they have provided him the opportunity to succeed. While much of our domestic efforts support our international efforts, the deliberate training of him has proved a worthwhile investment as he has already secured funding to scale up their work in all four of those areas.

When Covid hit and things started shutting downs it brought discouraging news to us each day as our volunteer-led meal packaging events cancelled in droves. Our leadership team met to discuss strategies and, since our core activity is providing meals for hungry people. we anticipated a greater need so ordered additional ingredients to warehouse in preparation, although there was no demand, yet. Then, phone calls came from food banks and agencies wanting to purchase meals we might have in stock. Although we had abundant ingredients, the challenge of getting them assembled was our biggest obstacle. A corporation called and said they had employees on PPP that needed something to do and could we modify our normal assembly method to be socially distanced. We created that new model and added increased protocols to meet CDC guidelines. We also discovered that agencies were very interested in our new Pantry Pack model of assembling 7 bags of our 4 varieties of meals in a small box for ease of delivery. The corporation engaging their employees assembled 250,000 meals of our varieties, but the challenge of getting them put in Pantry Packs still loomed. Then, the Kansas Division of Emergency Management called, offering to purchase and assemble those meals in Pantry Packs using the Kansas National Guard. Soon, they ordered 1,000,000 meals and used the National Guard to assemble the meals then assemble the packs. In 6 months, they packaged 8,250,000 meals then ordered another 2 million from our new machine. This pivot provided Outreach the capacity to adapt to a new market and create the technological advances to set a course for the future.