Evelyn Mount
Founder of Reno Community Outreach Program
Evelyn Mount started out asking co-workers to donate food for needy people over the holidays, and ending up feeding tens of thousands of people over more than four decades.
Raised in rural Louisiana during the Depression, Mount was taught at an early age to share food with others. Although her family didn’t have much, they shared what they did have. Mount said she recalled her parents and grandparents playing host to big neighborhood dinners. “They wouldn’t let us eat breakfast, lunch or dinner without having us check with the neighbors to see if they needed food,” Mount said. “If they did, we had to feed them first and then we would be able to eat.” And when they cooked meals, young Evelyn was told to knock on their neighbors’ doors. “Every time we would go to eat, my grandparents would say, ‘Did you check with so-and-so to see if they needed food?’” she said.
After marrying and moving to California with her family, Mount continued the tradition of helping others, especially at holiday times. Often working six days a week and raising a family, she still found time to host dinners for others on Sundays, inviting anyone who needed a meal.
Mount and her husband, Leon, moved to Reno in the late 1970s. There, she began working as a telephone operator for the airport and began collecting food donations to give to the hungry at Thanksgiving. “I was used to it, and I just couldn’t let that holiday go by without me doing something for someone,” Mount said. “And that’s what I did.”
Once her co-workers found out what she was doing, they decided to pitch in and help. She ended up collecting more than 200 bags of food that first year and took them to people in need. The program grew from holiday giving to food distribution every Friday, and eventually became the Evelyn Mount Community Outreach Program, managed by Mount and her husband for more than 40 years.
Every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, she and a group of volunteers collected food donations to feed those in need, including turkeys and hams. From one woman’s goodhearted impulse to help others, an organized tradition of feeding needy families in Reno grew. Each holiday season with the support of nonprofit organizations and businesses, it feeds more than 10,000 residents, in addition to helping feed senior citizens year-round.
In 2009, the City of Reno dedicated a community center in honor of Mount’s giving spirit. The Evelyn Mount Northeast Community Center features a year-round pool, fitness center, gymnasium, teen room, and meeting rooms.
In 2019, at the age of 92, Evelyn Mount finally retired from the program that had become her life’s work, living behind a legacy of service to the people of northern Nevada.