STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

When the COVID pandemic shut down the Wood River Valley, Candice Stark got a phone call from a woman who runs a housekeeping business in Wood River Valley. Those who clean homes in the Wood River Valley are in trouble, the woman told her. Their electricity is being shut off. Their work has evaporated overnight.

Stark started asking questions. And she learned that many of those who landscape Sun Valley's estates, who scrub its vacation homes, who teach in its schools and who work in its hospital don't live in Blaine County at all.

They live in Lincoln County, in small towns like Shoshone and Richfield and Dietrich, where the tax base is thin, the nonprofits are few, and the commute to work can run 70 minutes each way on a good day.

"In Blaine County, we probably have 99 nonprofits you could ask for a donation. In Lincoln County, we probably have four,” said Stark.

Stark decided Sun Valley-area residents should help close that gap. She started The Shoshone Project with enough donations to fill holiday baskets for 12 families. The next year it was 25. Now they serve 175 families with holiday baskets and fund programs that touch nearly every corner of Lincoln County life — from preschool classrooms to food pantries to the community swimming pool.

Recently, Stark led several supporters and donors 43 miles south of the Wood River Valley to show them the impact The Shoshone Project has had.

They included Lynea Newcomer, the new executive director of the Hunger Coalition; Hunger Coalition board member Margo Peck; the Hunger Coalition’s Director of Operations Blanca Romero, Wendy Drasdo and Geoff Smart.

What they found was a county running on grit, grants and a stubborn refusal to let its kids fall through the cracks.

The first stop was the Lincoln County Youth Center in Richfield, where Director Rebecca Wood met the group in a former church building that had sat empty for a decade. Wood, a Lincoln County commissioner, started the youth center in 2020 after years of watching children in her community drift.

As a cook at the local K-12 school, she said she watched kindergartners come in with bright faces and big potential, saw them take two years to get through kindergarten because they weren't ready. By second grade, they were falling behind in reading. By junior high, they were being lost--to early drinking, to teenage pregnancy, to juvenile detention.

"About 70 percent of our workforce drives to Blaine County or Twin Falls or Jerome to work. They leave at 6, 6:30 in the morning. They're not home until 7 at night. The kids are left really long hours,” she said.

Older siblings watched younger ones. Nobody was doing homework. Those who weren't busy with FFA or 4-H ran the streets.

When Wood became commissioner, she discovered the job was about budgets and buildings—not families. Three years in, she revolted. She told her fellow commissioners the county needed to do more.

She found the old church building on the edge of Richfield and started writing for grants. A $250,000 Community Development Block Grant through the Idaho Department of Commerce bought the first building. A five-year $141,000-a-year federal grant from the Department of Education's 21st Century program funded afterschool and summer programming.

AmeriCorps teams ripped out the orange shag carpeting, replaced the roofs and laid new flooring.

The center opened its doors to 25 middle school students, who had been sent home the previous year without finish their school year because of the Covid pandemic. And they had the collective idea that the world was ending and they might as well party until it did.

Today a more settled youth center supports 80 kids a day throughout the year. It runs an early learning center, an extensive afterschool program and such summer camps geared toward basketball and other activities—with home-cooked meals to boot.

The Shoshone Project helped pay off the $20,000 mortgage on the early learning center and is now funding a free pre-K readiness program after Wood identified that even a $10-per-child fee was a barrier for families.

The center also runs Lincoln County Connections, a transportation program born from the simple realization that the vans sat idle during the day. It drives elderly residents to doctor appointments and takes kids to college visits.

"It was very gratifying to pick up these people and get them out and moving again after Covid," Wood said.

The program just won its first Idaho transportation grant — about $100,000 a year for two years starting in October.

The Shoshone Projects fingerprints were everywhere at the Shoshone school, where the tour met principals Kelly Chapman and Kelly Wilkins, along with Superintendent Rob Waite and Child Nutrition Director Sierra Naylor.

Ten guitars now sit in a classroom where before there were none. There's a beginning guitar class and an advanced class on the way.

The Shoshone Project also gave $750 to pilot a hallway snack program boasting met sticks, goldfish crackers, Chobani yogurt and cutie oranges after Chapman noticed that every kid in the building was hungry by 2 p.m.

"Our secretary recognized it," Chapman said. "At 11:30, kids are hungry. They go to lunch at 12:30. That covers it. Then about 2 o'clock, they're looking around, scavenging for something."

The elementary school receives a state grant for a fresh fruit and vegetable snack program, but the $13,000 to $14,000 in state funding runs out before the school year ends, said Naylor. This year, the Shoshone Project covered the gap so the program could continue through the last day of school.

The Shoshone Project also facilitated a van donation from the Hunger Coalition that allowed Naylor to expand the summer lunch program beyond Shoshone’s park to neighboring Richfield and Dietrich and to add grab-and-go breakfasts. They've paid the district's student meal debt multiple times and jumped in to replace a milk cooler when broke.

At Hope for the Hungry food pantry in Shoshone, administrator Cheryl Mason showed the group through a building that started in 1960 as a telephone switchboard call center and has since been a dentist's office, lawyer's office and the Canal Company headquarters.

Mason, a pastor, started feeding three or four families a month in 1999 with whatever neighbors could spare. Now the pantry serves 35 to 50 families a week. It distributes food boxes, USDA commodities and holiday baskets, and its resource center helps people apply for benefits, file taxes, build resumes and find jobs.

The Shoshone Project provides $2,500 a month for eggs and protein. With USDA programs canceling fresh and frozen meat donations, The Project’s gift supplies 80 percent of the pantry’s meat and eggs.

A young woman in Richfield delivers 50 dozen eggs a week at $3 a dozen, and Mason crams her car full of hamburger, chicken breast and bacon purchased at Grocery Outlet in Twin Falls since the pantry doesn’t have a truck.

"Having the protein--because pantries all over are struggling to have those meats — we are so incredibly blessed," said Mason.

Mason's wish list is for energy-efficient freezers to replace the garage-sale castoffs that sometimes pop open over the weekend, spoiling food, and staples that donors never think to give — cooking oil, salt and pepper, garlic powder, cereal, peanut butter, shampoo, deodorant and diapers.

"Even those with food stamps — hygiene items aren't covered," she said. "I have individual donors who will buy $50 worth of deodorant, and it's gone very fast."

The final stop was the Lincoln County Pool, which has operated since 1972 in a cinder block building that has been patched until there is nothing left to patch. The pool runs four sessions of swimming lessons for up to 90 kids each session, a youth swim team of 35, aerobics classes, and lap swim — all staffed by 10 to 12 high school lifeguards drawn from Shoshone, Richfield, Dietrich, and Carey.

The Shoshone Project funds swim lesson and swim team scholarships. Admission is just $4 for kids and $5 for adults. But, when a child shows up without money, the manager quietly slips them a free pass from a stack she keeps at the front desk.

"People tell us sometimes that we should raise our prices," she said. "But we raise our prices, they go back to the river."

A bid to replace the building came back at $5.1 million and the pool was rejected for five of six grants it applied for. Lincoln County doesn't have money set aside and the citizens are taxed out. Not to mention many are paying as much as $400 a month for the commute to Blaine County.

"We're looking for a couple of really philanthropic folks who could step up and help us build a new pool building and a little community center," said Stark. "In the summer, it's where the kids can play and be safe and learn to swim. That is vital to the health and wellness of our community."

By the end of the tour, tourgoers were brainstorming how those in Blaine County might be of further assistance.

And it all began with a phone call.