Bow Hunters Feeding Starving Families

By Jenifer Dixon

Every year, members of the grassroots hunting organization Back Yard Bow Pro (BYBP) donate thousands of pounds of venison to local charity groups to help alleviate hunger in two North Carolina counties. It’s a popular program that organizers hope will spread across the nation to help hungry families.

This local non-profit group, founded in Weaverville, N.C., has come up with a formula that helps everybody. They help the hungry by donating fresh meat to charities. They help landowners by reducing the excess population of deer that destroy much of the locally grown organic produce. They help hunters by giving them not only a larger purpose to the hunt but by integrating their function into the community.

The concept was literally born in the back yard as Joe Lasher and Adam Ellwood of BYBP and Billy Stewart of Farmers and Hunters Feeding the Hungry discussed ways to help the community in their backyard.

“It takes a community to combat hunger through hunting,” said Lasher, the founder of BYBP.

Lasher talks of hunting and fishing as a heritage of the people of his area. And given that one out of four children and one out of four seniors are “food insecure,” meaning they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, the need is great. But simultaneously, the program helps people to understand the role of the hunter.

“The greatest goal is that we want to help our friends, our family and those less fortunate, because that is what the hunting heritage is all about,” says Lasher.

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