Barb Olson Aslesen

“Wow, thirty-eight years,” Barb Olson Aslesen says with a tone somewhere between a sigh and a chuckle. “Wait, thirty-eight years?” She pauses and performs some invisible math. “Yeah, thirty-eight!”

Olson Aslesen was fifteen when she and her childhood friend Bill Foussard heard about three local families in need of a warm Thanksgiving meal and decided there was something they could do to help. “We thought it would be nice to stay up all night and cook for them,” Olson Aslesen remembers. “It was just something easy we could do.”

Thirty-eight years later, she, Foussard, a core group of five people, and more than 1,000 last-minute volunteers make up the Thanksgiving Meals on Wheels program (not affiliated with Meals on Wheels), which provides meals for 14,500 Twin Citians each Thanksgiving.

Though Olson Aslesen says she didn’t “wake up one day and decide to feed 14,000 people,” she does wake up every day with a love and desire to help children. She insists it’s what keeps her going despite raising her own four teenagers, her busy career, and being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis eleven years ago. “I want those kids to know that there is someone out there who cares for them,” she says. “Knowing that for one day a year they will have a really full stomach.”

Seven years ago, she expanded on that idea and started Block Out Hunger, a food drive through Grace Church of Eden Prairie, providing Trinity Mission and other area food shelves with 50,000 to 75,000 nonperishable food items each spring. This assures, says Olson Aslesen, that kids who don’t have school lunch still have something to eat.

Coupled with a standing date to teach and entertain 250 kindergarteners and first- and second-graders at Grace as part of the weekly religious education program, Olson Aslesen’s schedule can be taxing—especially with her illness—but she remains resolute.

“People ask me why I still do all of this, when I have a reason—an excuse—not to,” Olson Aslesen says. “But for now, it is something I can still do, so why would I have anyone else do it?”