Community Highlights: Meet Pamela Walshe of The LoVVe Project

Today we’d like to introduce you to Pamela Walshe. 

Hi Pamela, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
At the beginning of the pandemic, a friend of mine with a daughter at Ellis Elementary School let me know that they were letting students out for spring break – and they wouldn’t be coming back for the rest of the year. Knowing that many kids get most of their meals at school, she had the idea of doing a food drive to collect some staple items and give them to families in need. We thought it might be a one-off, or that perhaps we’d organize gathering/giving supplies for a few weeks. We never dreamed that we’d be here two years into a pandemic with a full-service food bank.

As time went on, I continued collecting supplies in my living room, and every other Saturday we’d put everything on the front lawn of my friend’s home. We mostly had canned goods, dry goods, and hygiene supplies. People learned about it through word of mouth from the Ellis teachers, the families would show up and within 15 minutes everything we had would be gone. It was rewarding on one level – I always felt so thrilled to see people come and take what they needed. But it was also heartbreaking because I knew we were only scratching the surface of a much bigger issue of food scarcity in our community. It felt like we just weren’t doing enough.

The generosity of our community gave me hope that we could grow our program into something so much more impactful. When I initially asked my immediate neighbors for donations for that first food drive, much to my surprise many of them said things like “well, I only had a jar of peanut butter to give you this time, but if you do it again, I’ll shop for it.” It was truly heartening to see that many of my neighbors were willing to shop on a consistent basis for other families they had never even met. Moreover, many of them thanked ME for creating an opportunity to give back – at a time when there were so many people in need, I learned that people wanted to do something, they just didn’t always know where to go or how to help. So, what started out as the gathering of a few canned goods evolved into people dropping off bags of groceries and even Costco-sized loads of supplies. It became clear that the pandemic wasn’t ending any time soon, and also my home was bursting at the seams with donations. I knew we needed to find a better solution to gathering and distributing supplies and to get the word out to more families.

Right around the same time that the scale of donations was dramatically growing, our City Councilman Paul Kashmann offered some seed funding, and another local non-profit – Stigma – obtained a grant and offered to buy fresh meat, produce, and dairy supplies for us on a much larger scale. The final piece of the puzzle that brought everything together was our partnership with Celebration Community Church, who offered the storage space we needed to grow and provided an official location where we could distribute food. At that point, The LoVVe Project was born.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Storage and refrigeration are a perpetual challenge because they are currently the primary reason we cannot expand much more in our current location although we intend to explore other strategies for that in the near future.

Probably one of the biggest challenges, in the beginning, was feeling like I didn’t fully understand the needs or preferences of the Hispanic community, which is why it was critical for me to bring on a Hispanic Board Member who could translate and provide culture guidance just as we did later on with Arabic-speaking advisors. It would be a huge waste of money and a disservice to the community if we weren’t buying things that people wanted and would actually use.

Funding remains a challenge as well, not so much because there isn’t funding available but because it can be so time-consuming to find available funds, to apply for them, etc. So far, I’ve built this organization “in the margins” while holding down a full-time job, which means I haven’t had as much time to go after additional funding sources as I could have. However, that will all change soon as I recently left my corporate job in order to work on developing The LoVVe Project full time.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers the name of your organization and share a bit more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are called The LoVVe Project and our tagline is “Neighbors supporting neighbors.” It is spelled with two Vs for “Virginia Village,” which is the Denver community where we originated. V is also for “vecinos,” the Spanish word for neighbor.

Our Mission is focused on providing fresh food including meat, eggs, milk, produce as well as hygiene and cleaning supplies. We currently support 45 families (about 200 individuals) with food distributions and a hot breakfast every other Saturday. But we’re more than a food bank. We’ve hosted special events like “Back to School” where we provided 200+ backpacks filled with supplies, we’ve given away warm coats to over 200 adults and children, and we’ve hosted three COVID vaccine clinics, vaccinating close to 200 members of the community. This past holiday season we were able to double the number of families served through a Denver Emergency Food Relief grant to provide holiday meal supplies in November and December. In those two months alone, we gave approximately 8000lbs of fresh meat and produce.

We are known for providing fresh supplies from local purveyors including a local Community-supported agriculture program called LittleJohn Produce, local ranchers Skypilot Farm and Buckner Family Farm, and dairy from Royal Crest. Most other food banks provide canned goods and shelf-stable items. Those things are critical for every pantry, but we want to complement those supplies with highly nutritious foods that might otherwise be out of reach to families due to cost or lack of accessibility.

Beyond the fact that we focus on fresh food, we also strive to truly celebrate the families in our program. For example, for our back-to-school event we had a photographer on site taking photos and gave framed prints to all of the families. For Mother’s Day, we gave moms some special self-care products. For Valentine’s Day our volunteers wore Heart headbands and we gave out bags of chocolates. For the winter holidays we included culturally relevant treats like Abuelita hot cocoa for our Hispanic families and large Medjool dates for our Muslim families. I’m passionate about these special touches because they’re fun, they’re a way that we can all connect around a shared experience, and it demonstrates that we care about people and showing love beyond just providing a baseline level of food staples.

I’m proud of our ability to be culturally sensitive to the needs of the families we serve. One of our board members is from Mexico and is fluent in Spanish, she serves as a cultural advisor and translator and has been instrumental in helping craft shopping lists for ongoing food distributions as well as things like special holiday provisions. We also work with Arabic-speaking liaisons who have been our connection to the Muslim community which has been critical to ensure we’ve provided essentials like Halal meats and items relevant to their cultures like lentils or spices key to traditional dishes.

I’m also proud of the way we’ve been responsive to feedback from families. In surveys, we learned people wanted more produce, so we doubled the size of the produce boxes and in the summer brought in extra crates of avocados and peaches. We also learned how essential hygiene and cleaning products are, so we’ve consistently been providing toilet paper, paper towels, and laundry detergent even though they are some of the most expensive items for us to purchase.

Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
I want people to know that what we’ve created in our community could be created anywhere. Food scarcity is all around us, and working together we can make a difference. People don’t need to follow the same path or provide the same services to make a real impact. It just takes a group of people that care to come together and take action. There is a lot of funding and resources available to those who go out and ask for it and who are good at making things happen. I hope to see more programs like ours develop across Denver because we are stronger together. I’ll paraphrase the author Jacqueline Novogratz who wrote Manifesto for a Moral Revolution who said something like “Just begin, and let the work teach you.” That has truly been our mantra, and it has served us well.

Contact Info:

• Email: pamela@thelovveproject.com
• Website: www.thelovveproject.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thelovveproject/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheLoVVeProject