For more than 25 years, hunters around the Garden State have been making a difference by working with Hunters Helping the Hungry, a nonprofit organization that raises money and coordinates the efforts of hunters, butchers, and food banks throughout New Jersey to help put food on the table for those in need.

The program began during the 1997/1998 hunting season, a result of the efforts of three Hunterdon County hunters along with help from a butcher named John Person and Kathy Rummel, the director at the time of Norwescap.

“We started out 25 years ago just as hunters, you know, wanting to go out and get some extra deer. New Jersey had very liberal deer quotas and bag limits. You could get unlimited does,” said Lester Giese, one of the founders of Hunters Helping the Hungry. “I was on a trip, and I was going through West Virginia, and I saw at one of the gas stations a brochure for Hunters Helping the Hungry. I picked up the brochure and looked at it and said, ‘What a great idea.’ When I got back, as it turned out, the state legislature just recently passed a law to allow venison donations.”

Five deer were donated during that first season, according to Giese. Today, the organization averages about 1,000 donations per year, which amounts to between 23,000 and 28,000 pounds of venison, he said.

Overall, since the program’s inception, Hunters Helping the Hungry has facilitated the donation of nearly 2.5 million servings of venison.

While the program originally started as a way to assist hunters who could harvest more deer than they could use, the organization’s mission has expanded. According to its website, Hunters Helping the Hungry currently aims to:

• Continue paying butchering costs for hunters who are able to take more deer than they can use;
• Support municipal and private property owners that pay for the butchering process directly while they attempt to reduce the deer population on their property;
• And set aside a portion of grants from the state Department of Agriculture to support and pay for the butchering of deer taken by farmers and their agents during depredation hunts.

These efforts ultimately help New Jersey’s food bank system and provide a source of protein to those in need, while also keeping the state’s deer herd in check

“So, kind of a nutshell, we started out just a small group of us with a small focus,” Giese said. “And now we’re trying to do a lot of things for a lot of people.”

The process: From forest to food pantry

In New Jersey the deer hunting season runs from the second week of September through the second week of February. According to Hunters Helping the Hungry board member Mark Charbonneau, this is one of the longest hunting seasons in the United States.

Hunters who want to make a donation bring their legally harvested deer to one of the state-inspected butchers that partner with the organization. Processing fees are paid to the butcher by Hunters Helping the Hungry from a fund consisting of donations and grants.

The butcher processes the deer at no cost to the hunter and gives it to one of the participating food banks, such as Norwescap, which partners with pantries in Warren, Sussex, and Hunterdon counties.

Venison issued to the food banks is distributed to over 400 charities around the state.

Although New Jersey’s deer hunting season starts in the fall, Charbonneau, a board member of about 20 years and a hunter of about 40, says that the process starts well beforehand.

“The process actually starts before hunting season starts. What I mean by that is hunters will start scouting certain locations to be able to know where deer are, to be able to prepare to harvest them legally and as ethically and quickly as possible,” said Charbonneau, adding that less than 2% of the New Jersey population are deer hunters.

Charbonneau continued, “So when you start that process of scouting areas, setting up your locations, then going afield, then harvesting your game, then removing your game from the field, then field dressing it properly, then bringing it to a butcher, then making that donation, there’s a lot of steps involved and there’s a lot of time involved.”

JB Person, an Hunters Helping the Hungry board member and the owner of GameButcher in Lebanon, is one of several participating butchers that process the donated deer.

“What the hunters do is come here, they have to fill out some paperwork, and along with the paperwork we request they also fill out a donation slip. They donate the whole deer,” Person said. “What we do is skin it and process it into various cuts – roast, steak, chops, and ground meat. Everything is cut, wrapped, and frozen and then when we have a bunch ready to go, I get in touch with Norwescap and then they come and pick it up.”

Game Butchers averages between 150 and 200 donated deer per year, according to Person, who added that Hunters Helping the hungry is “in desperate need of butchers.”

How to donate deer to Hunters Helping the Hungry

Hunters looking to make a donation can take their legally harvested deer to any of the participating butchers listed on the Hunters Helping the Hungry website.

Once the required forms have been filled out, the butcher will process the deer. The food bank will then pick up the processed deer from the butcher and distribute the frozen venison to various food pantries, emergency shelters, churches, etc.

If the dressed weight of the deer is more than 50 pounds, Hunters Helping the Hungry will pay the entire processing fee, according to the organization’s website. If the dressed weight of the deer is less than 50 pounds, the hunter will be required to pay the first $50 of the processing fee.

Throughout the 2025/2026 hunting season, a total of 802 deer were donated to Hunters Helping the Hungry. This amounts to 26,846 pounds of venison which yields 107,384 servings.

“The number one thing that people need to know about our organization is that the hunters of the great state of New Jersey are the reason for our success,” Charbonneau said. “The hunters have taken it upon themselves in the great state of New Jersey to go afield every year and harvest game to help those not as fortunate as most.”

For additional information about Hunters Helping the Hungry and how you can donate and/or get involved as a hunter or a butcher, visit the organization’s website at https://www.huntershelpingthehungry.org/.

The chorus for the song “Primary Colors” was something Walsh wrote years ago, with the song’s outro originally being used as a verse.

“And something just wasn’t quite clicking, and everything that I tried felt kind of forced,” Walsh said. “We were all just like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here, but it’s not quite doing what I think it has the potential to do.’”

The band then started toying with the dynamics between the verses and the chorus.

“It just unlocked something for me in the idea where I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of quiet, loud, quiet, loud format really works well with this song,’” Walsh said. “So yeah, it just transformed it instantly into an idea that felt a lot stronger.”

The album was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Will Yip, a relationship still budding from their 2014 album, “Charmer.” Collins said the new album’s sound is “as true as we could be to playing the record live.”

“I wasn’t as tied to the tones that have classically been Tigers Jaw because I think at this point, I’ve just come to this realization that no matter what, if we’re making it, it is Tigers Jaw,” Collins said.

The new album has a “palpable energy” that shares the same spirit as their earlier records, Walsh said. And while “tastes evolve,” the band followed “what feels good.”

“This is the best representation of the band at the time, and it’s almost like a snapshot of us as artists, as people, as a creative entity over this time in our career,” he said.

“Lost On You” is out now through Hopeless Records and is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.

On April 16, Tigers Jaw will perform at Union Transfer at 8 p.m. They will be supported by Hot Flash Heat Wave and Creeks, the solo project of Balance and Composure vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, who is from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Lawrence was recently named RIC’s first emergency management director, a role college leaders had been planning before the December mass shooting across town at Brown University, but which took on new urgency after the tragedy.

Few resumes are better suited to the job.

A 20-year career in the New York Police Department. Commanding officer of the NYPD’s Employee Assistance Unit. A master’s degree from Harvard.

Lawrence got to Rhode Island the way a lot of people do: through someone who grew up here and never really left, at least not in spirit. Her husband, Brooke Lawrence, grew up in West Greenwich, and is director of the town’s emergency management agency.

“I couldn’t imagine retiring in my 40s,” Lawrence told me. “And I couldn’t imagine not giving back to my community.”

Public service has been part of Lawrence’s life for as long as she can remember. A New Jersey native, she dreamed of following in the footsteps of her mentor, a longtime FBI agent. She graduated from Monmouth University and earned a master’s degree in forensic psychology from John Jay College in 2001, shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks.

There was high demand for police in New York at the time, so Lawrence raised her hand to serve. She worked her way up the ranks from patrol to lieutenant, eventually taking charge of the department’s Employee Assistance Unit, a peer support program that helps rank-and-file officers navigate the most traumatic parts of the job. She later earned a second master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“It’s making sure our officers are getting through their career in the same mental capacity as they came on the job,” Lawrence said.

There’s a version of Lawrence’s new job that feels routine, especially at a quiet commuter campus like Rhode Island College. And when Lawrence was initially hired part-time last fall, it probably was.

Then the shooting at Brown University changed the stakes almost overnight.

On Dec. 13, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national and one-time student at Brown, opened fire inside the Barus and Holley building, killing two students and injuring nine others. Neves Valente also killed an MIT professor before he was found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In eerie videos recorded in the storage unit, Neves Valente admitted that he stalked the Brown campus for weeks prior to his attack. He largely went unnoticed by campus security, which led the university’s police chief to be placed on leave and essentially replaced by former Providence Police Chief Colonel Hugh Clements.

Lawrence assisted with the response at Brown. She leads the trauma response team for the Rhode Island Behavioral Health Medical Reserve Corps, which staffed the family reunification center in the hours after the shooting.

RIC’s campus is more enclosed than Brown’s — there are only two major entryways to the college — but there are unique challenges.

For one, it’s technically located in both Providence and North Providence, which requires coordination between multiple public safety departments in both communities.

More specifically, Lawrence noted that every building on campus has the same address, which can present a challenge in an emergency. Lawrence has worked with RIC leadership and local public safety to assign an address to each building.

Lawrence stressed that she doesn’t want RIC to overreact to the tragedy at Brown, and she said campus leaders are committed to keeping the tight-knit community intact.

But she admits that the shooting remains top of mind.

“Every campus community sees what happened at Brown and says ‘please don’t let that happen to us,’” Lawrence said.

Lawrence said everyone at RIC feels a deep sense of responsibility to keep students safe during their time on campus.

And she already feels right at home.

“I want to come home from work every day and feel like I made a difference,” she said.

Dan McGowan can be reached at dan.mcgowan@globe.com. Follow him @danmcgowan.