About us

When DeWanna’s Closet was started 5 years ago, our purpose was to supply students with essentials they needed to be successful in the classroom. At the time we thought that would be uniforms and school supplies.

In the last 5 years we have heard too often of students who depend on the school as their major, or sometimes only, source of food. We at The Closet have known for the last two or three years this was a problem that needed to be addressed. We weren’t sure we were the ones to address it, but knew someone had to. We have kids in our parish that go home on Fridays and may have nothing to eat until they get back to school on Monday. We have heard stories of students looking around to see what other students may have left on their plates at lunch that can be placed in their pockets and brought home. We have heard stories of children coming to school on Monday morning with headaches because they’ve had nothing to eat since Friday. We’ve heard of families struggling to make ends meet and one of the few things they can cut back on is food, so they do without. Numbers indicate there are between 7,000 and 8,000 students in Calcasieu Parish in this situation.

When Sale Street Baptist Church came to us several months ago and said they had a facility they would like to see be used for some form of outreach ministry we knew the time has come for us to step out and address this issue. The clothing and supply aspect of The Closet keeps our volunteers busy and we didn’t feel we could manage to take on this major undertaking without our current ministry suffering. SSBC again stepped up and said they had a volunteer base ready to step in and do the manual operation of this program. After much prayer and discussion ,we launched FOOD FOR THOUGHT, a joint effort of DeWanna’s Closet and Sale Street Baptist Church in September 2021. We had food in our first seven schools the first month. We continue to roll out more schools as funds are raised. We currently have 17 schools on the waiting list. DeWanna’s Closet will be responsible for raising funds and keeping the food supply ready and the volunteers from SSBC will provide the labor on a weekly basis to see that the food gets from our shelves in our facility to the schools.

We wish this wasn’t a service our children needed but it is. And we can’t sit by and do nothing any longer. James 4:17 - “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.”