Who Powers You

2025 First Place

Inspired by the story of a newly sober young man who tried to help feed a few of his still-homeless friends, Tracie Byers has taken caring for the addicted, homeless or less fortunate to a new level. Byers, a Jackson Energy member, is the 1^st place winner of the 2025 Who Powers You contest sponsored by Kentucky’s Touchstone Energy Cooperatives. She received $2,000 for her ongoing efforts to feed and help the homeless in the local area.

“Southeastern Kentucky has been ravaged by the opioid epidemic, which has led to a growing homeless population. While most of the community is asking our government to step in, Tracie is staying busy, making a difference one person at a time,” said Tracy Smith, who nominated Byers.

“There’s hot coffee, and if you’re hungry, there’s chili on the stove,” Byers calls to two people she knows on a first-name basis, as they enter the safe haven she runs in downtown London, while being interviewed.

What started as taking roughly 80 meals a month to the homeless encampments in the London area has become Isaiah 58:10 Ministries and Outreach. Now serving people in five counties all the way to Tennessee, Byers and a team of volunteers served more than 4,000 sack lunches and more than 100 meals at the soup kitchen (not counting the people she helps shelter) in November2025.

“We offer food boxes if someone is hungry. We take out cold weather supplies to help them survive the winter months,” Byers said.

The beginning of the project was humble. “Soup beans!” Byers said, in crockpots with cornbread on the back of a trailer, powered by generators, trying to give the homeless warm meals. That eventually morphed into sack lunches, which could be scaled up to feed many more people. Word of mouth grew quickly about the outreach, as did the volunteer numbers.

“As people found out, you know the community was like, ‘that’s amazing, can I help?’ And it’s just grown from there. People just want to help,” Byers said.

Partnered with Corbin White Flag ministries, when temps go below 27 degrees, Byers and her team pay for motel rooms for the homeless population and provide food Monday to Friday. “We offer resource management, so if they need help getting out of a situation, getting their paperwork, birth certificates, if they want to get into a recovery, to reach out to a food pantry, we help them find resources so they can live a little more comfortably,” Byers said.

Every sack lunch bag has a QR code with links to resources for any kind of help a homeless or person in need might use to make their situation a little better. “There’s a whole list of resources available to them,” Byers said.

Byers is retired, after serving in the United States Navy for a decade as a young woman. “I work harder now than I did when I was getting a paycheck,” she said. But every day she’s led to this work by God. Her mother and grandmother performed some of the same kinds of helping gestures, but not on the scale that Byers is now.

“God is doing this. He keeps putting resources in our path to be able to help these people,” Byers said.

The job of helping the less fortunate doesn’t come without its toll. Byers said a family this past summer lost a brother and son to a drug overdose, but didn’t have enough food to feed the gathered mourners. Byers, passing out sack lunches at a gas station at the time, gave the family everything. The sister of the deceased tapped her on the shoulder at the gas station. “She said my mom is driving and we don’t have food to feed everybody. She asked me if I would come pray with them, and I did. I had never prayed a prayer like that before. I couldn’t imagine losing one of my kids, much less like that.”

“We have to help them,” she said. “It’s rewarding and humbling. People need to know they’re cared about. And if we can earn their trust and let them know we care, then we can help them.”

And helping is Byers’ job now. Helping those who are addicted, homeless or otherwise in need, Byers is there for them, organizing an outreach one sack lunch, one resource, one coat or hat at a time.

If you want to help, go to https://is5810.com/

2025 Second Place

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Nate Jarboe has had the heart of a servant since he was young, saving his pennies for an African Elephant Rescue he had seen on television. Now a senior at the University of Louisville, he’s focused on local issues, raising $3,000 personally for cancer research.

Jarboe, a Salt River Energy member, is the 2nd place winner of the 2025 Who Powers You contest sponsored by Kentucky’s Touchstone Energy Cooperatives. He received $1,500 for his fundraising work.

Starting at age nine, Jarboe volunteered for United Way projects that helped feed the hungry. Starting with a local backpack program that covered school breaks. “We ran that up through my sophomore year of high school, helping five counties to cover school breaks (with food),” Jarboe said. The program ended for a good reason, with grants that could cover the work that Jarboe helped start.

“He connected with local non-profits and businesses to found the Give a Day for Hunger initiative, which supplied an over $80,000.00 value in donations and volunteer time, becoming a sustainable program across the state,” said Lori Jarboe, who nominated the 2^nd place winner. “He organized over 1,200 volunteers, mostly children, over those first three years of the program,”

That venture made him want to do even more.

“It made me feel good,” Jarboe said. “It made me want to volunteer in my community. It was a way I could go spend time in my community and with my friends in a way that I knew it was helping people.”

But his volunteer spirit didn’t end there.

Soup kitchens, Gilda’s Club, the Ronald McDonald House and others became Jarboe’s outlets for doing good work for others simply because it needed to be done. “He has done everything from raising money for Kourageous Kids, spending time as a Big Brother to a child with cancer (taking him to ride go karts and play video games locally), to regularly cleaning the rooms and making the beds of those staying at the Ronald McDonald House while undergoing medical treatments,” said his nominator.

Once he got to the University of Louisville, where he’s a pre-med Biology major and now a senior, he worked through his fraternity to start raising money for cancer research through the Raise Red initiative, which raised $95,000 in donations from his fraternity alone. The money goes to pediatric cancer research.

He and his friends also help out at the Active Heroes retreat in Shepherdsville, where he was interviewed. They’ve cleaned, worked on landscaping and much more to advance the organization’s goal of “supporting veterans and their families with healing and hope.”

Now a four-term service chair with the Sigma Chi fraternity, he thought they could do more service hours when he was just a freshman. “It didn’t just have to be some guys hanging out, we could do some good,” Jarboe said.

He admits that he wanted to join a fraternity in order to have a number of friends in a service organization available to help make positive changes where they could. And they have.

“We’ve done close to $300,000 in community impact while I’ve been in the chapter, and involved in some way. Whether I was president and overseeing the service chair this past year or service chair myself, we’ve done more than 7,600 service hours,” Jarboe said.

With RaiseRed, the dance fundraiser popular at universities, a lost sponsor didn’t stop Jarboe from meeting and exceeding their fundraising goal.

“I don’t think I’ve worked harder at anything in my life,” he recalled. Meetings with alumni, fraternity brothers and anyone who might be able to help, the fraternity raised $95,000, a record-breaking sum for any organization on campus.

No matter what phase of his life he’s in, Nate Jarboe is using his extra time in service to others. He plans to go into medical school, and possibly the armed forces, to further his service to others.

2025 Third Place

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For the last 12 years, Mike and Julie Peterson, members of South Kentucky RECC, have spent hours each week feeding the hungry. They’re the third-place winners in the 2025 Kentucky’s Touchstone Energy Cooperatives’ Who Powers You Contest. For their efforts, they’ve been awarded $500, which they will invest back into their program to feed more children.

Their ministry, Project 58:10, has a simple mission: packing bags of food for school children who may not have enough to eat to take home to their families on Fridays.

“They have gone the extra mile for years to make this happen,” said Mike New, who nominated the couple for the contest. “Fundraising alone is a huge task. Volunteers are assembled weekly throughout the community, with different groups packing bags. This would not have happened without the leadership and effort of the Petersons.”

The name of the charity is based from the scripture Isaiah chapter 58, verse 10 (NIV), “And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noon-day.” “God wanted Michael and Julie to be in this program,” Michael Peterson said.

The Petersons were immersed in the program through a series of fortunate events, but they chalk all of those events up to a higher power intervening.

“Michael and I got involved with Project 58:10 12 years ago, and we started packing 50 bags a week out of Oak Hill Baptist Church, which we felt like was a huge feat,” said Julie. “Our church has really shown up for us. We have multiple volunteers every other Tuesday from picking the food up from Kroger, to setting it up in the gymnasium and then coming back that evening to help pack the bags.”

Four local churches are part of the ministry. “We are fortunate that we have a community that sees the need,” Julie said. The schools provide a number of children facing insecurity, but do not provide the names.

“It’s been literally every Tuesday since 2014, Julie is at Kroger picking up groceries,” said her husband Michael. Despite rising food costs over the years, the couple receives donations from local businesses and church offerings, and has never had to say no to a child.

“We have been very blessed. If a (child at) school has a need, we’ve been able to meet it,” Julie said.

The project serves 22 schools, four libraries and a number of head-start programs. The number of bags filled with food for needy children has grown to more than 800 per week across the county, more than 35,000 over the course of each year, including summer months.

Kentucky Hunters for the Hungry is now a partner with Project 58:10, and provides a protein program to add to the bags. “Proteins were items we were having to remove from the bags because of the cost. Now we’re able to provide about 80,000 venison meat sticks,” said Mike.

It’s more than a labor of love. “You can’t fake this,” Michael said. “It’s in our soul.” Julie added it’s been a blessing for their own kids to learn what it’s like to give back to others.

“If there is anything I can tell anyone, do something, find something that you’re passionate about, and do it,” Julie said. “There are people who may have a small need or a large need. You may not know what that need is. And I think it’s so important that people find that. Whatever the need may be, there is always someone you can help.”

The Petersons say they’ll continue to help out, feeding thousands of hungry kids every week, with the hope that some day the need will lessen, but pouring themselves into Project 58:10 as long as the need exists.