2013 Choice Employers, Community Involvement Champion: Michelle Lindsey

In the Christian County seat of Ozark, the local grocery store owner delivers truckloads of food for Care to Learn children, a hair salon provides them free haircuts, a dentist sponsors essential toothpaste and competing banks battle in fundraising efforts. At the center of it all is Michelle Lindsey, sharing the need and collaborating the resources to benefit the community’s at-risk students.

The veteran technology teacher in Ozark public schools saw a need several years ago to help feed kids on the weekends. Her vision started with just 12 students receiving nutritional aid between the school weeks.

Five years later, Lindsey now also serves as volunteer director of the Ozark chapter of Care To Learn, the nonprofit Springfield businessman Doug Pitt started to meet emergent health, hunger and hygiene needs of students.

“I never dreamed in five years’ time God would provide the resources to help kids nearly 9,000 times a year,” she says, pointing to a wide variety of community involvement.

Local churches regularly hold food drives. The two-day Sertoma Duck Race raised $30,000 to benefit the Care To Learn chapters in Ozark and Nixa. The Ozark School District has stepped up, too, establishing a staff payroll deduction option for Care To Learn donations and providing Lindsey a small stipend for her role in serving students outside of her teaching hours.

“It means a lot to me that the district recognizes the importance of this program by offering that stipend, but helping kids in need is never about money or recognition,” she says. “This is definitely an all-hands-on-deck mission. From the kid who drops his candy wrapper in the recycling bin so we can turn trash into cash and cover operating expenses to the mayor and drycleaner owners who sponsor a $20,000 fundraiser, the Ozark community realizes that everyone has to pitch in to give our most at-risk students what they need to be successful in life.”

On average, Lindsey spends up to 20 hours a week on top of her regular workload processing requests for student assistance, overseeing fundraising efforts, speaking to community groups, ordering food, coordinating volunteers and working with Care To Learn’s advisory board. Lindsey says she’s just living out the school district’s motto – “Every child, every day, whatever it takes.”

“Give a child the first pair of new shoes they’ve ever owned, watch them smell them and see them look like they just unwrapped the best gift under the tree on Christmas morning and you’re hooked,” she says. “For every child in need we’ve helped, though, we know there is another that we’ve missed, so we have to keep trying.”[[In-content Ad]]