For the past five years, Ashley Henry-Saorrono has made a hobby of extreme couponing. 

In order to get the best deals, she buys plenty of newspapers every week, has her mom and several friends on the lookout for the best coupons, surfs couponing websites, and will sometimes even look to recycling bins and trash cans in her search for elusive coupons.

Henry-Saorrono, the senior recruitment and outreach coordinator in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s George W. Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, uses her skills to help her family and friends and to buy work supplies.

Now, Henry-Saorrono is putting her skills to work by helping the less fortunate.

She is a member of the Saline County Progressives, a political action committee with a grassroots outreach effort to tackle hunger in the community. The group’s most recent project is creating care kits that members give to homeless people who are asking for donations.

“If you see a homeless person on the street asking for help, you can’t always instantaneously help them,” she said. “I don’t carry cash, but now I can just roll down my window, and I always have something to help them.”

The care kits have water bottles, crackers, fruit snacks, granola bars, applesauce, pudding, Kleenex, and hand sanitizers. Each kit also contains a list of resources, including the addresses of local food pantries.

A group of 10 Saline County Progressives members met recently to assemble 200 kits. Henry-Saorrono donated many items she purchased using coupons, while other donations came from the 4-year-old daughter of a member, who asked for donations for the care kits in lieu of birthday presents.

In addition to the care kits, the organization supplies food to a mini-food pantry, essentially a wooden box set up in front of Benton First United Methodist Church.

Just like the “Borrow a Book” stands, people are able to take and leave food, water, and other essentials at any time. A second mini-food pantry is set to go up July 1.

Henry-Saorrono stops by the mini-pantry three times a week to donate food and other essentials that she gets a discount on through extreme couponing.

“Everything I put in there is always gone fast,” she said.