The Tuesday afternoon crowd at St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Key West was a heartwarming mix of need, generosity and gratitude.
It was also an impressive logistical operation, an assembly line of volunteers and workers from the SOS (Star of the Sea) Foundation hefting bags and boxes of groceries into the open trunks of cars or the baskets of people’s bicycles.
The food distribution operation would serve an estimated 1,000 people in three hours, and that was just one day in one location.
The SOS Foundation unfolds similar operations every week in Key West, Stock Island, Islamorada and Key Largo, said Tom Callahan, the foundation’s volunteer executive director, who credits his assistant director Raquel Rojas and Maggie Howes, Monroe County’s emergency volunteer assistance coordinator.
“Maggie can round up 50 people in 24 hours, and she is at every single distribution site every week,” Callahan said. “Those two women are phenomenal.”
“Key West is on Tuesdays and Stock Island’s Bernstein Park is on Thursdays, and while each location started out feeding about 700 people per week, we’re now up to about 1,000 people at each of those two sites. In the Upper Keys, we serve about 350 people at each of those two locations, but the need is definitely greatest in Key West and the Lower Keys.”
The need has become so great, the helpers now need help.
“We need more food,” Callahan said.
But this sort of unprecedented demand goes well beyond a canned food drive.
The foundation has relationships with a variety of sources that provide bulk amounts of needed food items, including frozen meats and fresh produce.
“Much as we hate to do it, we have to ask for monetary donations to continue these food distributions,” Callahan said. “We’re not the only ones helping, and so many groups have been doing everything they can. But you see people in these lines that you’d never in a million years expect to see asking for and accepting help. But then, they haven’t been paid in seven weeks.”
The SOS Foundation isn’t the only organization that needs help helping others.
Key West’s Sister Season Fund for years has helped workers in tourism-related industries pay rent or bills when they are forced out of work by illness, injury, or now, a pandemic.
In the early days of the virus-related shutdown, Sister Season quickly began providing $1,000 grants to local households. The organization last week was forced temporarily to halt applications when the need exhausted its resources and the organization faced a waiting list of 75 applicants.
As of May 5, the organization was once again accepting applications, according to its website, which also provides links to other sources of assistance.
Visit SOS Foundation at sosmissiong.org or on Facebook to donate and visit sisterseason.com to donate or apply for assistance.
