Well, the holidays can be a stressful time, especially for people facing hunger.

A new campaign fights food insecurity in Clay and Laurel counties, with some familiar faces.

Lending a hand.

CBS reached out to me and said, we want to do something in your region as as a good corporate citizen.

I talked to Brandon Storm because we want to think regionally, and we talked about the food pantry that has a regional presence and has the ability to effectuate a plan.

And volunteers of America.

And we reached out to both of those and they said, here's what we can do.

If you get us this, if you get us some some access to funds.

And then when I mentioned that back to CBS, they said, hey, if you're willing to do that, we'll go up to $20,000.

If you find us a $20,000 match, which was easy to do.

And then we recently just got in two other donations.

Anonymous, $10,000 that will.

Allow more children to be fed with healthy and nutritious meals for senior citizens to be fed.

And we're going to expand the number of routes and play.

And then mobilize God's Food Pantry distribution center to be able to provide more support to families here in Laurel County.

We provide a lot of drug and alcohol treatment services and recovery services that are non residential.

So those clients will have the opportunity to access a food voucher.

And they will now have access to healthy nutritious food.

It's a time of year because of the cold.

That can be stressful on your budget.

You got higher heating bills and things of that nature.

You've got Christmas coming on, and people are trying to do things with their family, which there's those types of things that they're wanting to spend money on, and generally can be just from a mental health standpoint, kind of a stressful season.

So this will help a lot of families.

And you heard the numbers.

It's not going to be 5 or 10.

It's going to be hundreds of families and hundreds of children that this is going to impact at a very critical time of the year.

We hope this is a catalyst.

We hope that other, private donors and other public partners want to come in and say, hey, you know what?

This is a great initiative.

It's all about synergy.

It's all about working together.

It's all about resiliency and fortitude in in the region.

And so we hope that that's a catalyst to begin.

Other individuals, you know, contributing to this project.

And we hope this is just the beginning.

22% of its citizens experienced food insecurity on a regular basis.

16% of the citizens here in Laurel County experienced food insecurity.

So we know this is a significant need.

I hope this partnership tells a community that's going to be impacted by this, that, you know, if we all work together, we can thrive together.

And, you know, it's not about me.

It's not about another location.

We all might cheer for someone else on Friday nights at the the basketball game or the football game, but at the end of the day, we all live here and we all work here, and we need to work together and help one another.

The Kentucky Beverage Association also donated pallets of water for the food initiative.