Spark

Matthew 25 is what motivated father and son Jim ’75 and Tim ’03 Paauw to launch Sus Manos Gleaners in Jenison, Michigan. “Jesus says when we feed the least of these, we are feeding him,” said Jim, who works as a doctor of nutrition. “We can’t feed all of them, but we are doing what we can.”

Sus Manos Gleaners is an organization that accepts food donations from west Michigan farms. Volunteers chop the produce and then process it in an industrial food dehydrator. The dehydrated food is packaged in 55-gallon drums that are shipped to Christian missions that serve the poor.

About a million meals from Sus Manos Gleaners have gone to orphanages in Haiti. “Haiti has been on my heart ever since my wife and I visited there on a mission trip in 2009,” said Tim, who is a principal in Jenison Christian schools. “One morning I woke to the sound of the entire village wailing, crying, and playing drums. I learned this was a mourning ritual as a young boy starved to death just outside of my living quarters during the night.”

Jim said the orphanages in Haiti are struggling to feed children. “The pandemic destroyed what little they had. People who were getting by with one meal a day are now getting by on three meals a week.”

The Paauws got the idea for Sus Manos Gleaners in 2004. They were both youth group leaders and led a group of high school students on a trip to a Gleaners organization in British Columbia, Canada, which followed a similar process. “Each morning we woke up there were literally thousands of pounds of green peppers waiting next to the warehouse as donations from the local farmers to be chopped and dried,” said Tim.

There were similar organizations in Canada, but none in the United States. That didn’t stop the Paauws.

“Christ laid a task on us,” Jim said. “Tim and I were too ignorant to know what we were getting into.” There were many hurdles they had to overcome to get the organization off the ground. Farmers in west Michigan have been eager to partner with the organization and donate food.

The biggest need that Sus Manos Gleaners has now: more volunteers. Julia Doornbos ’08 coordinates volunteers, many who come from local churches. “Whenever I talk to volunteers and thank them, they are so grateful to be a part of this,” she said.

For more information about Sus Manos, visit smgleaners.org.