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GEORGETOWN - A few years ago, Georgetown home builder Mike LoVullo
bought three cows and set them out to graze on a bit of land owned
by his co-worker Lee Godbolt. LoVullo had a dream that he could
raise enough beef to feed the people who rely on the Friendship
Place soup kitchen in Georgetown. His efforts have ballooned into
the creation of the nonprofit Outreach Farm, which in its first
year had 49 head of beef cattle and more than 70 acres of leased
land.
Kathy Wilson Robinson, director of Clemson University's Center for
Neighborhood Development at the Institute on Family and
Neighborhood Life, checked with national organizations, including
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and found that the farm is the
only organization of this kind in the country.
"It is unique in that it has become
self-sufficient within a very short time," she said via e-mail.
"It fills a niche in the quality of food that selected food
assistance organizations are able to get in the Georgetown area."
Outreach Farm Board President Steve Lowe
and LoVullo said they hope to replicate the program in other parts
of the county.
LoVullo didn't always work with the disadvantaged. He was a home
builder for 25 years in Rutland, Vt. About 1995, he heard
the local soup kitchen and homeless shelter needed a cook for
Sunday meals. He didn't have any particular cooking skills but he
volunteered anyway. There he met shelter operator John Casserino.
"He was an amazing man," LoVullo said. "He is one of the people
that I admire. He helped needy people when he was in his 30s,
unlike the rest of us who do it in our 60s."
Casserino, who had a wife and two young children, gave up a good
job with the power company to run the shelter, which was deeply in
debt. While volunteering there, LoVullo put together a
program called Choices, which involved taking recovering
alcoholics and drug addicts into the schools. "We didn't ask them
to tell the students what not to do," LoVullo said. "They told
them what they did and what the consequences were."
After he moved to South Carolina, LoVullo volunteered at the soup
kitchen, held a fundraiser and helped remodel the kitchen.
He also noticed very little beef was being served at meals. He
remembered that the U.S. Department of Agriculture used to
provided beef to the soup kitchen in Vermont but that wasn't
happening at Friendship Place. "Beef is expensive,"
LoVullo said. "When Friendship Place spends money to buy beef they
have to cut back on other programs." That is what prompted
LoVullo to buy three cows to help the soup kitchen. He said his
little cattle operation quickly got, "cost prohibitive," so in
September 2004 he applied to become a tax-exempt corporation
complete with a board of directors. From that point it
grew. |