HATTIESBURG, Miss.—In a room wrapped with framed paintings and photos of the late Oseola McCarty, volunteers counted the hundreds of pounds of dry and canned goods stacked on tables around the room.
They spent one whole day in November counting and most of the next day sorting them into brown paper bags. Each bag—packed full with canned soups, beans, bags of flour, and other pantry favorites—had a name marked in Sharpie on the outside. By 4 p.m., volunteers started calling the families whose names were listed and distributed them food well into the night.
Rosemary Panella, who was working as a barista at Mulvi’s Coffee Co. in Hattiesburg at the time, collaborated with the Oseola McCarty Youth Development Center to organize the food drive that distributed “shopping carts’ worth of food” to 68 Mississippi families on Nov. 10, 2025.
The Hattiesburg native’s first exposure to the OMYDC was more than 10 years ago when their brother volunteered to build a tool shed for the center for his Eagle Scout project. Later, a representative from the OMYDC visited Panella’s church during a Bible camp, offering the attending children advice and inspiration to pursue college. After this experience, Panella began to volunteer with the center and worked at Bible camps similar to the one they attended as a child.
When the 25-year-old took a social-work class in college that required 40 hours of community service, the OMYDC was an easy choice.
“I routinely volunteered with them for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I volunteered with them a little bit last spring as well. The relationship has just kind of continued,” Panella told the Mississippi Free Press. “I send people their way whenever they’re looking for certain people (to talk about their professions). Over the summer, they do a summer camp where people talk to kids about their career and give them an idea of what they could do with their lives.”
During 2025’s government shutdown, Panella felt concern for the potential consequences that freezing SNAP and WIC benefits would impose on those who receive them within one of the poorest states in the U.S. As a senior social work major at the University of Southern Mississippi and a volunteer at both the Oseola McCarty Youth Development Center and Edwards Street Fellowship, Panella has witnessed that food insecurity affects more than just the most visibly impoverished.
“Whenever I was helping people fill out their paperwork, I saw a lot of people that you wouldn’t expect to go to a food bank there to get food,” Panella said of their time volunteering at Edwards Street Fellowship. “I saw people that looked like people who come into my work, or someone well dressed, maybe a little bit older, going to a food bank. I realized at a very young age, hunger didn’t have an actual look to it. It was just, like, people either were hungry or they weren’t.”
As seen in 2023 federal data (the most recent after the Trump-appointed USDA Director Brooke L. Rollins discontinued the Federal Food Tracker in 2025), Mississippi is the hungriest state in the nation, with 19.4% of its population facing food insecurity—7.3% higher than the national average. Of the approximate 2.94 million people who live in Mississippi, 32.1%, nearly one-third, were eligible for SNAP assistance as of the 2020 census, the highest percentage of any state in the country.
Feeling the pressure as last fall’s government shutdown extended into the longest one recorded in U.S. history, Panella decided that they wanted to partner with a local organization to hold a food drive to make up for any gaps in federal funding. They first contacted Edwards Street Fellowship, who reportedly had enough resources and support to continue business as normal. With this in mind, Panella felt they could make a bigger impact working with the OMYDC, whom they expected may need more support.
Janet Baldwin, founder and executive coordinator of the OMYDC, recalled the concern that Panella expressed when the college student first called her about organizing the food drive.
“Rosemary was worried about these families. These families that come here, we don’t charge them anything—for our after-school program, our summer camp: nothing,” Baldwin told the Mississippi Free Press. “So when (the federal government) started cutting these benefits, you know, half of these children are on benefits. And so they said, ‘Ms. Janet, I just want to do something for them.’ I said, ‘Baby, go for it.’”
With a list of recipients in hand, Panella began to spread the word above the drive. They posted and reposted a graphic on their social-media pages and reached out to people they knew to solicit donations. Soon after, the young organizer heard from several local businesses who asked to serve as drop-off points for food, including Moore’s Bike Shop, WDAM, and Oak Grove Library.
“So many people jumped to my aid,” Panella said. “I planted the seed, but I could not have done any of this if it weren’t for all of the other people who came to water the garden.”
One of these metaphorical gardeners was Sara Watts, a nine-year OMYDC grant-writer and volunteer who also serves as the innovative operations coordinator for the City of Hattiesburg.
“She helped me a ton with organizing certain things, doing the math, figuring out what goes where,” Panella said. “She really solidified this (food drive) and was like, “This is what we’ve got to do, where we need to go, how we have to do things.’”
Watts, who has known Panella for almost 12 years, was stunned by the community’s response to their food drive, especially with how this response crossed both cultural and geographic lines.
“It was so cool to see the way Rosemary was able to bring the punk community they’re a part of in to the work at the youth center,” Watts said, “It was really shocking for me, because that community is just not connected with that part of Hattiesburg, and their cultures are very different. You can literally see it when you cross over Southern Avenue, how things change.”
Angels on Earth
The Oseola McCarty Youth Development Center is a historic tin-roofed brick and wood-paneled building on McSwain Street. The building—originally the Third Ward School for Blacks and then the Grace Love Elementary School—stands in the southern quadrant of Hattiesburg’s Ward 2, what Sara Watts identified as one of the “most impoverished communities in Hattiesburg and greater Mississippi.”
Bordered by the Leaf and Bouie rivers, Ward 2 is home to East Jerusalem and Palmer’s Crossing—neighborhoods whose populations are 78.3% and 92.4% Black, respectively. The median income for both of these neighborhoods is well below Hattiesburg’s median of $30,700 per year, with East Jerusalem reporting $16,800 and Palmer’s Crossing reporting $22,900 median household incomes in 2018.
The OMYDC serves needy families from both within their neighborhood and outside of it, including Columbia, Purvis and other communities that neighbor Hattiesburg. The majority of the center’s programs are pointed toward children 17 and under. They regularly host a catered after-school program and a summer camp, and the organization gifts bikes, toys, clothes, and more to the children of families who apply for their services.
The center’s staff of volunteers closed its annual Toys for Tots campaign at the end of December, a program that repeatedly proves to be the organization’s largest. The OMYDC delivered toys to more than 600 families by the end of the 2024 winter holidays and surpassed that number this year, gifting a grand total of 4,020 children with toys and clothes in 2025.
The center does all of this and more without any expectation of pay, neither from its patrons or for its staff. Watts characterizes the OMYDC’s founder Janet Baldwin as a manifestation of this selflessness.
“If angels are real, and if they exist on Earth, that woman is one of them,” the 30-year-old said. “I mean, she has sacrificed—and there’s no better word for it—sacrificed her life for that community and for those children.”
When Baldwin founded the OMYDC in 2003, she named it for a Hattiesburg washerwoman from Shubuta, Mississippi, who in 1995—after a lifetime of saving wages paid in small change—donated $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi. McCarty, who died four years after what was then the largest single-donor contribution to the university, left school in the sixth grade to care for an ailing family member. Around this time, she began her career as a laundress in Hattiesburg. For 87 years, McCarty cleaned clothes by hand, boiling and rubbing them on a Maid Rite scrubboard before hanging them to dry.
McCarty began saving money at the age of 8, storing it in her doll cart to finance a never-realized dream of becoming a nurse. Philanthropists remember her as a frugal woman with “strong and virtuous character and good habits,” traits that helped her to save $280,000 from poverty-level wages by her retirement in 1995.
At the age of 87, McCarty decided that she would put this money to good use. She arranged the $150,000 gift with USM Foundation executive director Bill Pace, and the university soon after established an endowment fund in her name to offer scholarships to Black students who express financial need.
Word about this Hattiesburg washerwoman’s contribution quickly spread across the United States. Reporters from major news outlets like the New York Times lined up outside her house on Miller Street to meet her, Harvard University granted her an honorary doctorate, and President Bill Clinton awarded her with the Presidential Citizen’s Medal—the second-highest presidential honor for a U.S. civilian behind the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But perhaps more meaningful for McCarty’s legacy, her gift directly inspired a series of other contributions, both to USM and beyond. In Hattiesburg, 600 residents donated to the endowment, leading to a sum that more than tripled the fund’s original value. CNN and WTBS founder Ted Turner even credited McCarty as the inspiration for his billion-dollar donation to the United Nations in 1997, what was at the time thought to be the largest gift to a single organization in history.
Baldwin is among the many people from across the world whom McCarty inspired through her philanthropy. The two women were both members of Friendship Baptist Church, which Baldwin still attends to this day. McCarty, whom Baldwin remembers as “one of the sweetest people” she’s met, died of liver cancer in 2003, and Baldwin felt called to carry on her legacy of caring for the youth.
“After she passed and everything, the Lord just laid on my heart the profoundness of what she actually did. … I didn’t know anything about the nonprofit world, and so when I really submitted to doing this, I said, ‘Lord, I know you ain’t keep putting this on my mind for no reason. I’m gonna go for it.’”
As of today, more than 1,400 donors have contributed to the Oseola McCarty Endowment. In early 2025, 30 years after her gift, the USM Foundation announced that the fund has now grown to a corpus of $1 million. Since granting $1,000 to inaugural awardees Stephanie Bullock and Carletta Y. Barnes, the foundation has given scholarships to more than 130 students from South Mississippi in McCarty’s name.
‘Hattiesburg Gives a Damn’
While their food drive was successful in providing direct aid to families in need, Panella suggests there’s more systemic work to be done in order to address food insecurity in Mississippi.
“I admire the work that has been done so far. I mean, you know, I think that Bethany Rigney (the homeless coordinator for the City of Hattiesburg) does a wonderful job. I think that Toby Barker does a good job as well. I think that other people within the city of Hattiesburg offices do good work,” Panella said. “I just wish we had the resources to do more. … There are definitely enough wealthy people in Hattiesburg that if we kind of switched around some property-tax-type stuff, we might be able to make something work.”
A specific area which both Panella and Watts have noticed a lack is in the city’s public transit system. While Hattiesburg has buses that regularly run across the city, Panella claims that stop distance, cost and a lack of reliable information prevent some Hattiesburgers from effectively utilizing the service. Watts has noticed specifically how transportation infrastructure fails to service the residents of Ward 2.
“Many of the bus routes do not go to that neighborhood,” the city’s innovative operations coordinator said. “They go up to Southern Avenue, which is great, but they don’t extend into that neighborhood.”
Beyond issues of access, Panella has noticed a greater cultural issue that may be preventing needy families from receiving proper care.
“I think there’s a lack of trust (in Mississippi) between social welfare systems and the people that they serve. I mean, you see so many conversations about SNAP and WIC, where people are like,‘we’re banning junk food from SNAP or stuff like that,’” Panella said, referring to Gov. Tate Reeves’ recent proposal to ban certain sugary foods and drinks from SNAP. “A lot of this comes from the very racist stereotype of the welfare queen: someone who abuses government benefits to do things like get their hair or nails done.”
Despite challenges such as this, Watts is optimistic in the city’s ability to rise to the occasion.
“I want to say 41% of our population, according to the last census, live below the national poverty line, which is around 14,000 people,” Watts said. “That’s a lot of people to feed. But I want to say that they would have been taken care of regardless, because we do have a great community. Hattiesburg gives a damn—they really care about each other.”
The collaborative history of the OMYDC may serve as proof of this claim. The City of Hattiesburg donated the building that currently houses the OMYDC to the nonprofit. With the building having been constructed in 1950, it came to the center with a lot of structural issues, problems exacerbated in 2017 when the center was nearly destroyed by the EF3 tornado that tore through the city. In the wake of the storm, the roof was torn off of a majority of the building, and extended exposure to the elements caused mold to form throughout the center, leaving the building nearly uninhabitable.
Jerry Spann, a member of the OMYDC’s board whom Baldwin calls “her right hand,” remembers the work that he and other volunteers had to put in to repair the center.
“There were five women and one man. We actually pulled the tin from the back of the building, and we took grip pliers to grab the tin, let it down (off the roof), pick it up, all of that. So this is a labor of love. … It was hard work,” Spann said.
Once the roof was repaired, volunteers then had to scrub the mold from the walls before the building was usable.
“You could smell bleach from all the way down the street, right when you turn that corner,” Span recalled.
The 2017 tornado was not the first time the building’s roof had been damaged, either. In fact, when Hurricane Katrina struck the OMYDC in August of 2005, winds completely ripped off the roof over the entire middle section of the building. It took the center 10 years to repair this damage fully, and through that entire time, volunteers worked under cover of nothing more than plastic tarps while in this middle section. Only thorough hard work and community support did the center manage to repair this damage at all.
“Westminster Presbyterian Church, their church, was very supportive. They bought all the roof trusses. … George Pacific gave us $10,000, so that helped out with tin and to pay a roofer. My brother is a contractor so he came down to help, but we (volunteers) had to be the laborers to get that stuff up there.”
Today, after more than 22 years of giving to her community, the OMYDC executive coordinator has noticed how her community is giving back.
“We’ve just built such a rapport with the community,” Baldwin said. “Now they call me and tell me what they got and ask if we can use it. That’s what happens now.”
For more information on the Oseola McCarty Center and how to contribute to its cause, call 601-336-7940 or visit oseolamccartyydc.org.