This year marks 20 years of a Dublin charitable institution: The Love Basket food pantry. On the first and third Fridays of every month, Ray and Barbara Sissom and a small group of volunteers open The Love Basket, a drive-through food pantry that serves more than 100 local families.
Barbara was born and raised in Houston, and her husband Ray in a small West Texas town called Bronte, near San Angelo. They met in the Metroplex. “Our lives had both brought us to Fort Worth, and I knew Ray’s sister, and she set us up on a blind date,” says Barbara.
The couple has now been together for 33 years. In 2001, after retiring from their respective careers in Fort Worth (Ray was a mail carrier, and Barbara worked for Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, which was later acquired by AT&T) the couple moved to Dublin. “We’d bought a little bit of land down here that we wanted to retire on,” Barbara said.
The couple started The Love Basket alongside their Sunday school class in 2005. “Back in 2005 when Katrina devastated New Orleans, there were supposed to be five families moved to Dublin by the government,” Barbara said. “And so our Sunday school class at Patrick Street Church of Christ decided to take up boxes of shelf-stable items and toiletries and that kind of thing to get those families started when they got here. Well, we had just about gotten it all collected, and the government decided to send them somewhere else.”
A few members of the Sunday school class, including the Sissoms, thenpolice chief Lanny Lee and his wife Loretta, and Charles and Pam Crabtree, volunteered to take on the distribution of the supplies, and so the Love Basket food pantry began.
Because the Sissoms were the only volunteers who were retired at the time, they took on the greatest responsibility. Over the years, the scale of the operation grew. “When we first opened it up, we were open every week, and it was little bitty,” said Barbara. “We had maybe 15 families that we served, and so it was very manageable. But then, as the number of clients grew, and the more resources it took, the more hours it took, and we just couldn’t come up with the volunteers or the food to stay open every week.”
The Sissoms reduced their openings to twice a month. “We are now open the first and third Fridays of every month, and we have both a morning session and an evening session for those folks that work, and folks can come both Fridays each month,” she said.
November and December are the couple’s busiest months at the food pantry. “Up until this month, we were serving probably an average of 125 families every time we opened our doors so twice a month,” said Barbara. “This last Friday, we were open, we served 163 families.”
The food pantry is essential to the community especially now, when times are hard. “With the [issues with] food stamps, and the price of groceries skyrocketing and the price of everything else going up, we’ve had more and more families signing up in the last three or four months,” she said.
During the pandemic, the Sissoms transitioned the food pantry to a drive through model. “We’re located at the Quik-Lok Self Storage buildings there behind the police station on Elm Street,” Barbara said. “People just line up there in the driveways of the storage building and we serve them one car load at a time.”
The food pantry is supported by the Tarrant Area Food Bank, which provides low or no cost food items, as well as United Way, which provides some funding each year. The Love Basket also depends on private donors and local businesses. “I’m very grateful to those folks too, because they fill in gaps,” said Barbara.
The Sissoms enjoy interacting with the folks they serve, and plan to continue operating the food pantry as long as they can. “We’re just going to hang in there,” Barbara said. “My husband’s almost 80, and I’m just a couple of years behind him, so as long as the Lord will give us the strength and the resources, we’re going to do it.”
How to help the Love Basket
Volunteer
The Love Basket is open in a morning and evening session on the first and third Friday of each month. They’re looking for volunteers for both sessions, especially as their volume of clients is increasing. “One more committed volunteer in each slot would be wonderful,” Barbara said. “Right now we really need somebody in the evening sessions. It’s from 5-6:30 and we’re short-handed there because it’s Friday night, you know?”
Donate food
You can donate food at three collection sites in Dublin. One is at the library, one at Dollar General, and one at DG Market. “We always need canned meat. We always need peanut butter. We always need canned vegetables and canned fruit,” said Barbara. “We can use anything that’s shelf stable and are glad to get it, but those are the things that we run out of most often.”
Donate money
To send a monetary donation, you can mail a check to the following address: The Love Basket 3705 North FM 219 Dublin, TX 76446
Volunteer spotlight is a monthly column showcasing the good works of Dublin residents through nonprofit organizations. If you would like to nominate a volunteer for this column, please email publisher@ dublincitizen. com.