Reach St. Pete: Community nonprofit sees both sides of storms' impacts

Reach St. Pete, a nonprofit that normally sends its free Pop-Up Pantry around St. Petersburg to provide food for people in need, stepped up to deliver food and supplies after Helene hit. Then Milton followed and flooded the community nonprofit’s storage building. 

Earlier in October, the agency sent its Pop-Up Pantry, a donated and converted city bus, to provide supplies to 775 people who came to three locations around town. Community Foundation Tampa Bay and the Tampa Bay Resiliency Fund, a collaboration between Allegany Franciscan Ministries, Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg, Pinellas Community Foundation and United Way Suncoast, have both provided funding to support Reach St. Pete's hurricane relief efforts. 

Now, Reach St. Pete is continuing its hurricane supply relief distribution efforts after local business The Cabana Club offered its office as extra storage space and the use of one of its transit vans.

The Pop-Up Pantry will go out in November to provide food for its clients for Thanksgiving and will include hurricane relief supplies if there is still a need, says Alexia Perry Morrison, Reach St. Pete’s founder and executive director.

“We are assessing the needs, what people are wanting and what other people are doing,’’ she says.

The group also plans to use the contributed services of DoorDash drivers in November to deliver groceries to people in need. People can submit an application by going to the Reach St. Pete website at reachstpete.org, clicking on “Get Help,’’ then “Hurricane Relief” and then “Relief Delivery.’’

Morrison says the items the DoorDash drivers will deliver include emergency relief supplies, hygiene supplies, non-perishable food and other items, such as diapers and baby wipes.

Reach St. Pete moved out of its former headquarters on South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street before the hurricanes because black mold was discovered during a construction project. The agency hopes to sign a lease by the end of the year on another facility in the middle part of the county, Morrison says.

It will then be able to get back on its usual schedule of sending the Pop-Up Pantry out on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month for people who are food insecure or live in areas that are considered food deserts, areas that aren’t in easy reach to grocery stores. The mobile pantry stops at four different sites from 11:30 until 6 p.m. And hundreds of volunteers will again be delivering groceries to people in need who can’t get to the Pop-Up Pantry sites.

The agency continues to provide free, one-on-one tutoring for students from kindergarten to third grade to help them read on grade level by third grade.

Morrison’s own struggles in high school inspired Reach St. Pete, which started operations in 2019. For a while at that time, she was sleeping on friends’ couches, moving from house to house.

“I come from a family who did struggle with drug addiction and financial hardships, and I was fortunate and blessed enough to have a family who took me in,’’ she says.

She relates that memory on the agency’s website: “I often felt like I didn’t fit in with the resources available to people in need, and that is the lens in which we operate from at Reach St. Pete. Creating a safe, welcoming, dignified experience so it doesn’t feel degrading to receive help.’’

For more information, or to donate or volunteer, go to Reach St Pete or call (727) 275-8655.