has risen above $4 for regular gas in Florida<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe nonprofit Osceola Response Team drives all across the county every day to drop off food donations to its freezers placed throughout the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe go through $58 every day,\u201d Executive Director Richard Herr said. \u201cNow there are sometimes that we’ll stretch that $58 to the next day, but the next day we will be filling up again, and that’s just one vehicle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Herr continued, \u201cWe just came back from Clermont picking up food this morning. Today we got to go to St. Cloud and Narcoossee Road, come back here, go to Orlando. I mean, we have to, you know. That’s the biggest thing right now is that we need to start using our heads and really start looking at people that need help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Herr said Osceola Response Team has not gotten any state or county grant funding to continue supporting people. He has funded the organization through community donations and out of his own pocket for the last two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow we survive is we’re very conservative. We have people, like this doctor at the at the pantry that doesn’t charge us any rent,\u201d Herr said, discussing the support they have from building they rent from. \u201cIt’s a blessing. He gets blessed from Jesus. We get blessed from him, and it’s all, but you have to surround your people, and you have to surround an organization with people that want to help.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat’s how we that’s how we pretty much survive. By the grace of God, and we keep going every day,” he said.<\/p>\n
Herr said that in the long run, they want to help find solutions for people struggling to survive. He said far too many people are struggling to afford not only rising gas prices but the cost to pay for housing, groceries, utilities, and more.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is the system, to me, is broke. We can take a person that is homeless and put them into a program and set them up to go back in reality, to pay these high prices. It’s like gas, food, all these high prices that you can’t sustain,\u201d Herr said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe all of us need to join together,\u201d Herr added. \u201cI’m not telling the world to stop spending money right now, but be more conservative, be more thoughtful. If you have money in the bank, help somebody else, because that person may be losing their house.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nolan Portalatin receives support from Osceola Response Team.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings have gotten a little pricey, and things have gotten a little difficult nowadays living wise. So we kind of, like, need help every once in a while,\u201d Portalatin said. \u201cYou got to figure it’s between \u2018Am I going to get medicine this week, or am I going to get gas this week, or am I going to eat this week?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This week, he leaned on the Osceola Response Team for groceries, citing his own health and rising prices as reason why he felt drawn to the nonprofit for help.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m grateful for this place I really am because there’s been many times that me and my wife have been a little challenged on food and stuff like that,”\u00a0Portalatin said.<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cThey\u2019ve kept the food pantry going, and they help a lot of people. This place, it really gets a lot of attention.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. \u2014\u00a0The rise in gas prices is taking a toll on nonprofits that help people across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231016,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[274,24498,115,139,141,140,1976,278,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-231015","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-app-top-stories","9":"tag-jordan-mead","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-orlando","12":"tag-orlando-headlines","13":"tag-orlando-news","14":"tag-osceola-county","15":"tag-top-stories","16":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231015\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}