Larry and Julie Feist made spreading hope their mission

How do you inspire hope among the Flathead Valley’s most vulnerable? For Majs. Larry and Julie Feist of The Salvation Army, it requires lending an ear. 

“Sometimes you just listen to them and make them feel like they’re heard,” said Larry Feist on one of his final days before departing The Salvation Army’s Kalispell Corps last week. “We try and meet people where they are and try and get them to the next level.”

The Feists have spent a little more than four years listening to people struggling with all sorts of obstacles in the valley, among them addiction, poverty, homelessness and loneliness. Now the couple, who met through a friend in The Salvation Army and married in 2003, are headed further west, to Eureka, California.