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Alberta Denson's Work
By Michael Zangari
for Florida Today

Picture the city mission in your mind.
The chances are good that images of soup kitchen line from the 1930s come up in
dreary grey tones. The homeless standing outside in the rain and wind wait for handouts
under a neon cross. ¶

Now imagine those same people getting luxury cuisine, like snow crab legs
occasionally with side dishes from the Red Lobster Restaurant menu like baked
potatoes, vegetables, key lime and chocolate pie and cheese cakes.

That possibility is raised for selected charities nation-wide on any given day because of
a new program called the Harvest Food Donation Program.

The Red Lobster Restaurant chain sponsors it. The six hundred and forty-eight Red
Lobster restaurants nation-wide are participating. Each restaurant chooses a program
to sponsor at the local level and donates food for the programs to use. The programs
get food items from the menu such as fish, beef, chicken and shrimp. They also might
get other seafood items, seafood sauces and condiments. Thirty to fifty pounds of food
are donated daily depending on what is available.

The Red Lobster restaurants are company-owned by Darden Restaurants, Inc., in
Orlando. They also own the Olive Garden restaurants, Smokey Bones, Bahamas
Breeze and Season 52 restaurants. The Olive Garden is also participating in the
Harvest Food Donation program.

Anita Harris, manager of the Red Lobster restaurant in Merritt Island for the last ten
years said the restaurants wanted to give something back to the community. They
chose the Salvation Army to partner with. The donated food goes to the organization’s
domestic violence and safe house shelter and to the soup kitchen and shelter for those
in needs in Titusville.
.
“It’s the right thing to do. We have quality food that sometimes goes to waste. These are
food items that may have been cooked in error or in a greater quantity than we needed,”
she said. “It’s a great program that gives us a chance to partner with the community to
help out in a real way with something that is important.”

The Titusville Salvation Army facility does not fit the stereo-types of the urban shelters
from the 1930. It is a real community center in a residential area of town. It services
children and families as well as the transient population.

Alberta Denson age 65, has been cooking and doing crisis work for the shelter for 19
years. She has served fifteen thousand meals at the shelter so far this year and passes
out bread in the afternoons there.

“It depends of what people need. Sometimes people don’t get their checks or their food
stamps. We help them when they need help. I have 40, sometimes 50 people here for
lunch. Most are people who live in the community who are low income. Some are
transient.”

She said that during the summer she gets a lot of kids.

“I try to help everyone. I remember a time when my grandmother would leave the door of
the house open to help people. In the black community everyone helped each other.
That’s the way it was. It was a small community,” she said. “I get a lot of donations from
different places like the local grocery store, VJ’s, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver, and Red
Lobster,” she said. “I can make a meal out of practically anything. We grew up not
having much and we learned to stretch what we had and make it taste good. When we
get the seafood from Red Lobster, we can cut it up and put it in noodles or put it in a
mushroom sauce, or the Alfredo sauce we get from VJ’s.”

Although she said the times have changed and the community is bigger people still
know who she is. They call her Miss Alberta. She grew up and went to school in
Titusville. She said she sometimes thinks about retiring but not for any great period of
time.

“I enjoy it,” she said.

Snow Crab legs for lunch at the local mission
soup line

By Michael Zangari for Florida Today

Picture the city mission in your mind. The chances are good
that soup kitchen lines from the 1930s will come up, bums
and roustabouts standing outside in the rain and wind waiting
for handouts under a neon cross. Waiting for the bread and
the bone soup. It is the place where the people at the bottom
of the bottom of society get the basics for survival.
What if every now and then they got snow crab legs and sides
for lunch.
The Red Lobster Restaurants chain has made that a
possibility.
Trudi Hamilton, has been working for Red Lobster for over
seventeen years. She started as a food server and later
became a manager. She said she has seen an enormous
amount of food being thrown away at the end of the day.
Quality restaurant food ending up in the dumpster because it
could not be stored or used.
“That’s a tragedy,” she said. “Especially with so many people
in need.”
She has been particularly gratified at the effort at the
corporate and local level of the restaurant to bring awareness
to the needs of the community. The restaurants in Melbourne
and Merritt Island now package the useable food for the Christ
Is the Answer shelter in town.
The Christ Is the Answer mission has been around since
1969. It started in the home of mission manager Danny Ellison’
s parents out of their awareness of the needs of the local
homeless population. In the early days they housed fifteen
men in their home. Ellison was a teenager at the time.
“We got by on what ever we could get,” he said. “We got
donations from churches. We netted fish.”
The mission has grown to house fifty men. It has room for
seventy, despite heavy damage from the hurricanes. The
mission complex is uninsured and they literally lost their roof in
the storms. This comes on the heels of a devastating fire that
destroyed the housing for women and children. They no longer
can service women though current plans are to build a
temporary shelter for a single-family unit by the end of the year.
“We turn away two to three women a week,” he said.
Of the situation of the homeless in general he is concerned,
particularly about the so-called hobo camps in Melbourne
proper.
“These people are the dregs of society and the hardest to
reach or help,” he said.
He says that the mission serves the same purposes it always
has, it provides three meals a day and a place to be, the
difference between the chaos of the street and a basic
structure. A place where someone knows your face and cares
what happens to you.
“The world turns or stops on the need for something to eat. It is
the gas for go, or for going on. He says the line is without end.
Three meals a day. Seven days a week. Three hundred sixty
five days a year. Year after year. The lord say he will provide.
And he does.”