Twenty-five years ago in December 1999, Our Lady’s Pantry distributed food to 25 individuals in Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Migrant Mission. With the blessing of Father Demetrio Lorden, pastor of the mission, Project Hunger collections had just begun to help fight hunger in the community. The idea was to buy nourishing food with those monies and give it out after Mass to anyone in need.
Tom Bullaro, co-director of the pantry with his wife, Anita, for most of the past 20 years, said that one of its longest-serving volunteers was Celine Martel. And Martel, who was there from day one, once gave him a glimpse of those earliest days of when the pantry was just finding its way.
“According to Celine,” Bullaro said, “we would welcome our clients in the back of the church after Mass.”
“We stored our fruits, vegetables and canned goods in the utility room near the back side door,” Martel said. “We had two used refrigerators to keep perishables safe. Another room, to the right of the entry into the mission, is where we kept huge bags of rice, beans and flour. Volunteers would come during the week to divide this food into one-cup portions to be distributed later.”
“Bags were not filled ahead of time as they are now,” she pointed out. “Instead, we would fill a family’s bag in the utility room while they waited. We had a chart that suggested how many fruits and vegetables someone might get, depending on the number of persons in his or her family — or whether someone was living alone. After a family’s bag was filled with perishables and canned goods, one of us would bring over bags or rice and beans and anything else we had to share.”
“We didn’t have much food at all in the beginning,” Martel remembered. “We couldn’t feed our families even for a week. But it made a difference to those struggling to make ends meet for any reason. I remember one woman so overwhelmed with her bag of food that she threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug.”
Little by Little
“Before long, the number of persons coming for food from Wimauma and two nearby towns became unmanageable, so we divided our clients in half, with each family coming on alternate weeks,” Bullaro said. “And still more people kept coming for food. Eventually, the mission was too small to store all the food we were accumulating, so Father Demetrio gave us a room in the classroom building, where we remain today.”
“Soon afterwards, we connected with Feeding Tampa Bay and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get more groceries,” said Bullaro. “By 2008, we acquired our first truck. Within the next 10 years, we added our first refrigerated truck, along with four more towns to our service area. We expanded slightly to add a walk-in cooler and freezer to our tiny pantry. Within the following decade, we added two more refrigerated trucks and our website. Little by little the pantry began to grow into the big business it is today — a place of hope when times were hard.”
Our Lady’s Pantry — 2025
Today, Our Lady’s Pantry serves two groups of clients who visit it on alternate Saturdays. On average, about 300 come through its drive-through pantry each week, so that’s 600 on average every two weeks. Many of these clients have large families depending on them for food, so Our Lady’s Pantry is putting food on the tables of perhaps 2,000 men, women and children every two weeks. It currently distributes about 34,000 pounds of food every Saturday.
“Anita and I thank each of you who have helped us thrive all these many years because of your kind donations of food, treasure and time,” said Bullarto. “We have been open every single week since Christmas 1999, never closing, even during COVID.”
To read the full Story of Our Lady’s Pantry, please go to www.ourladyspantry.com and click on ‘News,’ then ‘2024,’ or go directly to www.ourladyspantry.com/the-story-of-our-ladys-pantry/.
