Tampa Bay group that supplies food banks and soup kitchens is on verge of going broke

Silver-haired retirees Jay and Jan Keyes steer their Hyundai into a deserted alley behind a Clearwater strip mall. They park between a Dumpster and a loading dock. From the back door of a Publix, they pull out big plastic bags of day-old bread, bagels and buns. They drive it straight to a food bank where, three hours later, Brett Perry picks up a loaf of wheat bread and a package of rolls from their haul. He's an 18-year-old telemarketer whose employer is going out of business. Hunger twists in his belly. "I would starve if it wasn't for this," he says.

The Keyeses are members of an invisible army of volunteers who scour the Tampa Bay area for leftovers, quietly parking at rear entrances to collect unsold food from restaurants and supermarkets. They bring it to food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters to feed the growing ranks of the hungry.

Now this invisible army is in trouble.

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Tampa Bay Harvest gathers 3 million pounds of food a year in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties — good food that's not quite fresh enough for businesses to serve to paying customers.

The Harvest runs on a shoestring budget of $50,000 a year. It has 600 volunteers, two refrigerated trucks and one employee, a general manager who runs the operation from his house in Brandon.

The group never had to do much public fundraising because it was supported by a charitable foundation. It would rather not name the foundation publicly so as not to embarrass it, because that source of money has run dry. Tampa Bay Harvest is about to go broke.

"It's crunch time for us. We're going to be short at the end of this month," says Rich Gonzalez of Clearwater, president of the board. Without a full-time manager riding herd on pickups and dropoffs, Gonzalez knows they'll harvest a fraction of the food they do now.

"Right now, we have a central person working with the Publixes and Longhorn Steakhouses and Olive Gardens," he said. "Without that, you lose the ability to coordinate and direct."

If the Harvest runs on a shoestring, Will Carey, the sole paid employee, is the shoestring. With a laptop and cell phone, he functions as a sort of air traffic controller for Tampa Bay's leftovers.

If a pallet of frozen chicken is up for grabs, if a fishing tournament nets a load of fresh trout, if a Pizza Hut has a pile of personal pan pizzas, Carey gets the goods to whoever needs them most.

"I'm the steering mechanism," says Carey, 57. "Those packaged deli sandwiches from 7-Eleven, they're like gold to us."

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Unaccustomed to asking for contributions, the charity has added a big digital "Donate" button to its Web site, www.tampabayharvest.org.

In a last-ditch effort to raise cash, a group of volunteers is planning a Family Fun Fest on Clearwater Beach on Oct. 24-25. They've been scouting other local festivals for ideas. The neophyte organizers have found themselves faced with decisions like how much of a fee to charge food vendors, or whether to allow a bungee jumping stand to set up on the sand.

The Harvest's reach extends from the beaches to eastern Hills­borough. That's where volunteer Greg Massey, a pastor at Lighthouse Ministries in Riverview, makes a dozen pickups a week at a Taco Bell, a KFC, a 7-Eleven. "It's tedious. But the vendors look forward to seeing us." The food is spread around to a battered women's shelter, a drug treatment program and churches' cupboards.

Massey worries about what will happen if the food charity can no longer employ a manager: "There probably wouldn't be a Tampa Bay Harvest."

Some volunteers do it for religious reasons. Others are looking for a little volunteer work with flexible hours. That's how Clearwater retirees Jay and Jan Keyes, in their 70s, started picking up baked goods from two Publixes twice a week. On a recent Thursday, they start their rounds at 9 a.m. By 10 a.m. they're handing over 200 pounds of French bread, rolls, pies and cupcakes to the RCS Food Bank, Pinellas County's biggest distributor of food to the needy.

They run into RCS director Kathi Trautwein, who notes that the pantry is serving twice as many people as it did two years ago. Clients can come in once a month and get enough to eat for three or four days. Many of the new clients are laidoff workers who are shell-shocked to find themselves at a food bank.

Some used to donate to it.

Trautwein is pleased to see all the bread: "Publix donates it instead of just tossing it like a lot of other stores do."

The Harvest supplies food to more than 100 pantries, soup kitchens and shelters a day. In the last 12 months, it has contributed 160,000 pounds of food to RCS, nearly 15 percent of the pantry's total. "There would be a huge impact if that went away," Trautwein says.

The pantry will start handing out food at noon. Its waiting room begins to fill up with people — normal-looking, non-homeless people who aren't really sure where next week's dinners will come from. Soon the line extends out the door.

It's just another morning in the land of plenty.

Mike Brassfield can be reached at brassfield@sptimes.com or (727) 445-4160.