By 7:30 a.m. on a mid-June morning, a small storm of activity had taken over a metal-sided warehouse in Las Animas, a town of 2,300 nestled along the Arkansas River and surrounded by farmland and gently rolling prairie on Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
Across the street from the towering, red-brick volunteers with unloaded crates of zucchini and potatoes, jars of peanut butter and bags of spaghetti onto plastic folding tables, and an assembly line formed as they portioned the food into hundreds of brown paper grocery sacks.
A few feet away, another volunteer scooped cups of cream-and-tan-speckled pinto beans donated by a local farmer into zip-top bags and outside, a handful of cars were already parked by the street corner, hours ahead of the scheduled start of food distribution.
Food insecurity and poverty in Colorado are declining. Less than a year ago, heralded Colorado’s poverty rates as among the lowest in the country, and he cited work to create good-paying jobs, attract business, improve education and to “grow an economy that works for everyone.”
But that is not the case in Bent County, where good local jobs are harder to come by since a Veterans Affairs hospital closed in 2001 and where the poverty rate is triple that of Colorado and ranks among the highest in the country. Around 30% of Bent County residents live in poverty, compared to close to 10% statewide, according to
Almost 20% of southeast Colorado residents – in Las Animas, Baca, Prowers, Bent, Kiowa, Otero, Crowley and Huerfano counties – reported eating less than they thought they should in the past year because they could not afford food, a 2025 survey from the found.
Local food pantries like Helping Hands try to bridge the gap, feeding an estimated 25% of the county’s population. Often, these volunteer-run organizations are one of the only things stopping families from going hungry, director Sharon Barber said.
“If you have social services calling and saying, ‘I have a family who needs food and I can’t get them food stamps for 45 days,’ we are that safety net,” she said.
In rural Colorado, ‘You learn to help each other out.’
A good chunk of southeastern Colorado is in the , which stretches from Leadville to the Kansas state line as the green ribbon of the Arkansas River and the black pavement of U.S. 50 wind east from Pueblo through tiny towns – Boone and Fowler, Manzanola and Swink.
It’s harder to get around here because of the geography, with miles of open road linking communities that may or may not have a gas station, a dollar store or a cafe dotted through the plains. But that hasn’t stopped Richard Smith from navigating life in Bent County the best he can.
On Helping Hands’ distribution day, he drove his wheelchair past the line of cars outside and into the warehouse, where a volunteer loaded a sack of groceries into a bag secured to the back of his chair. They joked that Smith should get a ledge installed so he can take people for rides.
Smith lives in an apartment about a mile away and his wheelchair is his main way of getting around town. He has cerebral palsy and lives on disability.
“The doctors told me by 15 I’d be in a wheelchair, but I’m not in it full time just yet,” he said, grinning. Now 55, he can still walk some short distances inside his apartment.
He used to work as a firefighter, then at Walmart, and then in 2013 his legs got bad enough that he had to go on disability, he said. He’s working on getting a vehicle, but for now he relies on a medical transportation service to get to appointments, like getting a crown put on by a dentist in Rocky Ford, 30 miles to the west.
“Most of the folks around here are friendly. We help each other out, and that’s pretty good, being in a small community. You learn to help each other out at times,” he said.
Helping Hands is a big part of that.
“Without them, the community would be struggling,” Smith said.
Barber knows how important a role the nonprofit serves in Bent County. She started Helping Hands more than 20 years ago after hearing a request at a prayer group about a family with two children whose utilities were shut off because they couldn’t pay.
“I almost couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I just felt like God wanted me to do something.”
Barber teamed up with others from the prayer group, and after Helping Hands started distributing food to the community in 2004, county leaders asked if the pantry would take over running federal food assistance programs, including and Commodity Supplemental Food Program.
Now, on top of managing those programs, Helping Hands supplies groceries to between 170 and 250 families every week and offers utility assistance for families who can’t pay their bills.
“It helps. It helps a lot,” said Rose, a longtime Bent County resident who asked not to use her last name. Rose was in line with dozens of others on distribution day, cars lined up around the block to wait for groceries from Helping Hands.
Rose moved to Bent County as a migrant worker about 50 years ago, but she didn’t start coming to the pantry until the coronavirus pandemic, when she and her husband needed help with food expenses. The food’s good, she said, if a little less varied lately. Not as much meat, if any. Hot dogs, sometimes.
She likes how quiet and peaceful it is in Las Animas, even when it feels like the big cities forget about the small towns and rural areas.
“They make all these rules that might help the big cities, but they need to fix the small towns, too,” she said.
The only grocery store for miles
Twenty minutes west of Las Animas is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it collection of buildings along a sleepy stretch of U.S. 50: a handful of homes, a volunteer fire station, a post office.
Tamara Sykes works in the one-room store opposite the post office, where she rings up groceries alongside squat, hand-painted red and blue shelves and a wall of refrigerators. Valley Grocery carries a little bit of everything – orange juice and deli meat, pancake mix and paper plates – for campers at the nearby and for locals bridging the gap between trips into town to the larger grocery stores.
This is Hasty, a hamlet of around 200 people, and opened in 1907, is the only place to buy food for at least 15 miles.
Sykes grew up one block over, in the building that used to house the post office, but now lives a few miles north in McClave with her husband and three children. She homeschools her kids and they’re active in 4-H, raising sheep, goats and pigs for show and doing leathercraft and cake decorating. But she remembers leaner times, when she was a single mom and relied on food stamps – officially called – and groceries from the food pantry to make it for a stretch.
Hunger and food insecurity is something people don’t talk about here, she said.
“Pride would be the main reason, especially in this area,” Sykes said. “Mental health, food… I think it links to pride, because we’re a very prideful people down here. We don’t grovel, we don’t want to be bothersome.”
But not talking about it doesn’t make it go away. It’s particularly difficult for older generations, whom Sykes said are even less likely to ask for or accept help. They might go to the monthly commodities distribution at the firehouse, where they’re less likely to run into neighbors because they don’t have to get out of the car.
Barber sees the same thing at the pantry in Las Animas.
“What I’ve learned over the years is the hardest population to reach is those that are 60 and over, because they always think, ‘Oh, someone else needs it more than I do,'” Barber said. “And so I have to say, ‘We have plenty. This is God’s provision for you. You need to take this.'”
Sykes’ approach is a little more blunt.
“They’ll come in and try to buy a pack of hot dogs and they’re counting pennies for like $2, and I’m like, ‘Are you good? Because there are resources you can get food from,'” she said. “I’m pretty up front.”
‘Not the Las Animas I grew up in.’
Bent County wasn’t always struggling this much.
Thirty years ago, the buildings in downtown Las Animas were filled with businesses; there were two grocery stores and at least three new car dealerships, former Bent County commissioner Kim MacDonnell said. Born and raised in Las Animas, MacDonnell moved away for a few years before returning home to care for her mother, who had cancer. She ended up meeting her now-husband and stuck around.
“This is not the Las Animas I grew up in,” she said, speaking by video call from her home overlooking the Arkansas River, a few miles outside of town.
There’s probably several reasons why the local economy is hurting and, as a result, why people are struggling to afford food, MacDonnell said.
But one thing locals often bring up is the closure of , the site of a VA neuropsychiatric hospital that employed 700 people at its height. The VA started winding down operations in the late 1990s as the agency moved toward outpatient services, and things in Bent County have never been the same, MacDonnell said.Helping Hands volunteer Susan Miller was a registered nurse at Fort Lyon before it closed and she had to find a new job in Pueblo, about a 90-minute drive away. Now retired, she brings dozens eggs to the food pantry every week, laid by her flock of 85 chickens. She drives around for hours every Monday after the food distribution ends, delivering groceries to about 25 people and families who can’t make it to the county garage because they can’t leave the house or they’re at work.
“We don’t have a lot of job opportunities,” she said, standing outside the county garage as volunteers carried bags of food to a queue of waiting cars. “Unless you were born into a family that farmed and inherited it all, or you own your own business – and then still sometimes that is rocky because they just don’t have the people to support it.”
The state of Colorado turned Fort Lyon into a prison after the VA closed in 2001, then closed the prison and turned it into a for people who are homeless. Miller and MacDonnell are among several Bent County residents who talked about the hospital’s closure as a turning point.
“Compared to how it was when the VA was here, itap never going to be that way again,” MacDonnell said.
But itap also not clear what comes next and how Bent County can start to turn a corner. People like Barber and Lora Cline, a local farmer who also runs Five Loaves food pantry in McClave alongside a team of volunteers, say they’re doing their best to meet the need that exists.
Does Helping Hands have the resources to meet that need? Barber paused. “Well, God always provides,” she said. The group’s biggest need is a building, so they can order and store more food than they can currently fit in their corner of the county garage.
Five Loaves leases the former grocery store in McClave, a community of a few hundred people about 25 miles east of Las Animas and north of Hasty. The pantry started in 2013, when several church members overheard students at a youth group dinner talking about going back for seconds because they didn’t have food at home.
Now the pantry is open for a few hours twice a month, feeding anywhere between 500 and 700 people who come from as nearby as across the street and as far as Bristol, more than 30 miles east.
Five Loaves is a different setup from Helping Hands, more like a normal grocery store where people walk around with a basket and choose what they want.
Peggy Whiting, one of the volunteers, demonstrated walking clients around the room to “shop” for groceries: cans of corn, tomatoes and green beans; canned tuna or frozen meat from Wiley Processing up the road; a boxed skillet dinner; a bottle of ketchup or barbecue sauce. The McClave United Methodist Church donates “birthday bags” with cake mix, candles and frosting, and there are hygiene products like soap, toilet paper and tampons.
The pantry sees a good amount of client turnover because people don’t always need food assistance long-term, Cline said.
“Everyone has a hard time at some time or another. Good times, we think they’re going to last forever and hard times feel like they’re going to last forever, but they don’t,” she said.
And despite the persisting poverty and uncertainty about Bent County’s future, that resilience is what makes the community special, MacDonnell said. If there’s a wedding or a death, people show up. When MacDonnell’s best friend was run over by a cow in April, countless community members came to her aid to help her navigate recovery.
“You feel that a lot in a year like this when there’s a drought and there’s so much uncertainty in the air. Even when there’s uncertainty, there’s a great deal of hope, because we do things for one another,” she said. “We see a challenge, and people have risen up to meet that challenge.”
