For more than six years, Tampa Lodge has partnered with Open Arms Ministry and used its Elks National Foundation Beacon Grant to provide an early Sunday morning Thanksgiving dinner to community members experiencing homelessness. This year provided several challenges to accomplishing this, but the determination of Tampa Elks to help those in need powered them through to find a solution. First, the meals this year had to be picked up instead of sharing the meals together. Second, neither kitchen at the lodge or ministry was available to use the weekend before Thanksgiving. After a Zoom meeting between lodge members and their Open Arms partners, it was decided that instead of cooking, the Elks would provide each recipient a gift card to Publix which has a deli. Members purchased 85 Thanksgiving greeting cards and on Nov. 12, they wrote messages of support in each one. Third, the lodge had to close for two weeks due to COVID-19 cases which caused the delivery of the gift cards to fall through. The gift cards were eventually located and retrieved from the FedEx office just in time for them to be inserted in the greeting cards and distributed Nov. 29. “Our warm-hearted mother-daughter team, Courtney Weil, PER and Cristina Sanchez, were at the Open Arms Ministry by 7 a.m. on Sunday morning,” says Rita Smith, project manager. They handed each attendee a card as they signed in. Despite multiple obstacles, Tampa Elks persisted to make sure that those who needed a meal could still get one.
Pictured are Christina Sanchez and Courtney Weil, PER handing out the cards.
Betty Orcutt, Ladies of Elks President, and Sue Moore are pictured with personalized cards.
