Business
News
Feeding
the poor: Not an obligation of law, but of love
By Lou Baldwin
Special to The CS&T
BIJAGUAL, Nicaragua — Transitioning from high school Spanish teacher
to executive director of what has since become a billion-dollar nonprofit
sounds like an unlikely career move, but that’s what Angel Aloma
did.
Aloma, executive secretary of the Florida-based Food for the Poor (FFP),
was born in Cuba of Lebanese-Hispanic heritage. His family left there
when he was 11, and he lived in Jamaica until relocating again, to Florida,
at the age of 28.
In the United States, Aloma, who also has experience as a bank auditor,
taught advanced Spanish at St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Fort Lauderdale
for most of the next 22 years.
He and his wife of 35 years, Denise, raised four children, Natasha, Dominic,
Christian and Adam, and he was content with life as a teacher. But social
consciousness was already part of the fabric of his being.
“I’d taken students five times to the Dominican Republic to
visit the homeless and I started a program to feed the hungry in Broward
County,” said Aloma, who is a member of St. Bernadette Parish in
Hollywood, Fla.
His work for social justice apparently caught the eye of officials at
FFP, a Catholic-oriented but nonsectarian agency that works among the
poor, mainly in the Caribbean and Central America.
After repeated invitations, Aloma finally accepted an offer to visit FFP,
and seven years ago he was hired as executive vice president. Three years
ago, his position was upgraded to executive director. In that short span,
he has seen the agency quadruple in size.
“In 2007 we gave $1 billion in aid,” he said. The bulk of
that aid is food received through the U.S. government, which is stored
in FFP’s huge warehouse in Coconut Creek, Fla., and then distributed
through a network of churches, schools and charitable institutions in
the countries it serves.
Although that is the major part of what FFP does, it is not the organization’s
sole outreach program. Primarily through private donations, the agency
has been able to fund the construction of simple homes such as those of
the recently completed Father Pfeffer’s Village in Nicaragua.
The agency also helps fund schools and other programs to help lift people
out of poverty.
“I see us getting more and more into sustainability, but I can’t
see us giving up relief,” Aloma said. “We have to feed the
starving and the poor. But, more and more, we don’t want to give
them a fish — we want to teach them how to fish. To give people
who are homeless a home is pretty much a miracle for me.”
Aloma calls attention to the Gospel account of Christ feeding the multitude:
“He didn’t send them away or give them 10 dollars. He said,
‘Feed them.’ We have a responsibility.
“It’s not an obligation of law, it’s an obligation of
love,” he said. “Our task is not to fix people, but to love
them.”
Lou Baldwin is a member of St. Leo parish and a freelance writer.