LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – The community is jumping into action to help people living in a West Las Vegas senior complex.
It started with a video online, and ended with dozens of pallets of fresh food and a thousand dollars being delivered to the complex.
After getting word of a $150 rent increase, Aldene Kline Barlow Senior Apartments resident Tanya Mitchell started going door-to-door to make sure her neighbors were okay.
What she learned disturbed her.
“Some of my neighbors had no food and they were eating cat food. My heart broke,” Mitchell said. “I wanted to do something about it.”
She said money isn’t the only obstacle keeping the group from fresh food.
“Many of them, over 50% of them, have poor health,” she said. “And many are disabled. We don’t have cars to drive to Smiths, to go to Walmart, to just take a walk and pick up a banana.”
The city says they’ve been working on getting a grocery store in the area for a while. Mitchell says she worries if it doesn’t come, people will die from malnutrition.
In the meantime, she’s jumping into action. She called her friend, and Co-Founder of the Samuel L. Smith Educational Foundation, Rodney Smith, who delivered food to the complex within hours.
“It was beyond the excitement of Christmas,” Mitchell says. “I was so frantic about the bananas, because you know how perishable bananas are, and there’s no store around here to buy bananas.”
The blessings didn’t stop there. After a video of Mitchell receiving the food delivery circulated online, a $1,000 cash delivery was dropped off at the complex Friday.
Mitchell took it upon herself to distribute the cash evenly among her neighbors.
“I got kind of warm and fuzzy over the fact that the lady doesn’t know me, and you’re trusting me to help someone else,” she says.”That meant the world to me, that meant the world to me that an angel trusted me.”
Smith says they’ve added the complex to their food distribution list and will be making food deliveries regularly.
“We need people to speak up, and then once they share their needs, we need those who can provide a resolution to that need to step up and help,” Smith says.
Copyright 2024 KVVU. All rights reserved.
