Our Daily Bread Food Pantry on Marco Island is in summer mode, which means fewer volunteers but just as many mouths to feed.
A recent donation from the philanthropic foundation started by Best Buy founder Dick Schulze will help the nonprofit buy food for its new summer kids’ program and its regular distributions, said Our Daily Bread Executive Director Evelyn Rossetti-Ryan.
“We are averaging 150 new families every month. We distribute food six days a week,” Rossetti-Ryan said in a phone interview. “These are working families. These are working people who are trying to stretch their dollars to make ends meet.””We are so so so blessed to have the support of foundations such as the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation. We are eternally grateful.”
Keeping overhead low to spend money on feeding families
The foundation, with offices in Naples and Minneapolis, recently awarded $45,000 to Our Daily Bread, Rossetti-Ryan said. “This particular grant is really going to help support the pantry operations; it’s going to help us purchase the food we need to purchase to help families.”
Our Daily Bread, now in its eighth year as a mission of Family Church of Marco Island, has received grants from the Schulze Family Foundation for four years through its application process. The Schulze Foundation focuses most of its grant-producing activities on “nonprofits serving working and middle-class families” in seven counties in Minnesota and in Collier, Lee, Charlotte, Glades and Hendry counties in Florida, according to the foundation’s website.
This year’s grant was among the $400,000 in donations and grants the food pantry was awarded so far this year, said Rossetti-Ryan who has been executive director for nine months. With an annual operating budget of $1.6 million, Our Daily Bread gets about half of the food it distributes from in-kind donations and purchases about half, she said.
With Rossetti-Ryan as the only full-time employee at Our Daily Bread, the charity spent 97 cents of every dollar raised on programs directly to feeding the hungry in 2023, she said.
“My goal is to keep us at that benchmark as long as we possibly can,” she said. “We keep our overhead very low.”
“The little pantry that could”
In its first year, Our Daily Bread served about 820 families, Rossetti-Ryan said.
“Since Jan. 2024, our numbers have topped 1,000 pretty much every single Saturday,” she said. And that’s just on Saturday; it doesn’t include the weekend student kits or breakfasts Our Daily Bread distributes to five schools and summer camps on Marco and in Collier County. It also doesn’t include the special distributions in about four locations through the week or individual deliveries and scheduled pickups.
“I call us the little pantry that could,” Rossetti-Ryan said. “Our numbers really grew” after Covid and Hurricane Ian. People are still recovering from those events, she said, plus inflation that has increased housing, gas and food prices.
Our Daily Bread “guests” receive pre-assembled family food packs – a change from pre-pandemic days when guests would shop at the pantry, Rossetti-Ryan said. Each pack contains 26.5 to 30 pounds of fresh produce, frozen protein (meat, chicken, etc), eggs, milk, bread, cereal and other canned and dry goods “assorted to meet or exceed the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2020-2025) and is estimated to feed a family of four an average of three to five days.”
New program on Marco Island starts in June
Starting June 6, Our Daily Bread will kick off a new program for families on Marco Island. The Youth Summer Meal Program was initiated by the Island Country Club Charitable Foundation.
“They were really concerned about kids and families,” Rossetti-Ryan said.
Family meal kits will be distributed weekly to 31 families and 74 children that attend Tommy Barfield Elementary School and Marco Island Charter Middle School, she said.
The food pantry worked with guidance counselors and principals at each school to identify families who might be interested in the program and then contacted them, she said. “We wanted the focus of this summer meal program is to address food insecurity to families and kids on Marco Island.”
Volunteers, donations, grants and partners make it possible to serve so many, Rossetti-Ryan said.Harry Chapin Food Bank in Naples helps a lot, she said.
“We get wonderful support from our community, however with our increasing growth, Harry Chapin has really stepped up.” with kid’s kit meals supplement what Our Daily Bread distributes to schools. With extra food brought to Our Daily Bread and with recipe cards to give recipients ideas for some of the items in their carts.
“We are the community resource. We feed people. We feed souls. We provide food, hope and encouragement,” she said. “We’re part of the economic engine. Provide nourishing healthy food to people in our community and they are then able to do what they need to do.”
Before joining Our Daily Bread, Rossetti-Ryan was regional coalition program manager at Lee Health. A Connecticut native, Rossetti-Ryan has a Doctor of Education, Educational Administration from Columbia University in New York. She has spent most of her career working for nonprofits.
“I have never been so humbled and so honored to be part of an organization. We have people bringing their full self – bringing their expertise with them,” she said. “I’m so super proud of our pantry, our little pantry that could.”
Previously:Best Buy founder’s foundation gives historic gift to NCH Healthcare System
