ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 An undeniable truth is that moving is stressful.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
With food assistance programs from the government being cut back, local food pantries are stepping up to fill the gap, including Love Thy Neighbor, which is expanding this week to serve more people \u201cWe’ve packed up most of this stuff,” said Joanne Braccio, pointing to stacked boxes with food inside.<\/p>\n She is the owner of Love Thy Neighbor FL food pantry and thrift in St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n The nonprofit serves anyone in need, but following back-to-back hurricanes last year, rising food prices this year and now a government shutdown, she said her customers have been struggling.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’ve gone from a thousand people a month to almost two thousand. And I’m starting to watch the news this morning, and I’m really starting to get scared,” said Braccio.<\/p>\n To help the increased need, they decided to move four blocks away to a larger space. But they had no way of moving the large freezers and refrigerators\u00a0used in the food pantry.<\/p>\n She admits she was starting to panic until she got an unexpected call.<\/p>\n \u201cGod bless you, sir,” she said as she hugged Wade Swikle. “Thank you so much, this means a lot to me. I’m a little emotional now, but thank you for doing this. We couldn\u2019t have done this without you.\u201d<\/p>\n Swikle owns 2 College Brother Moving and Storage. He heard that Braccio was struggling and knew he had a solution to her dilemma.<\/p>\n He offered to move the entire food pantry and thrift store for free.<\/p>\n “At the end of the day, I mean, it just makes you feel good about doing business,” said Swikle. “We’re all in business to help people. At the end of the day, we’re here to solve problems.\u201d<\/p>\n For Braccio, his kindness moved her to tears.<\/p>\n “To have people help me with this, to have people that believe in what we are doing, and for the actions to be happening it’s like, I’ve prayed for this for a long time,” she said with tears in her eyes.<\/p>\n The new location is on 7110 5th Avenue N in St. Pete.<\/p>\n Braccio said they will be open on Thursday in their new location with the same hours. She said this was important to make sure those in need didn’t have any delay in getting food and other necessary items.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 An undeniable truth is that moving is stressful. What You Need To Know With…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3076,274,3075,1548,115,596,135,137,136,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-24059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-app-good-news","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-erin-murray","11":"tag-good-news","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-pinellas-county","14":"tag-tampa","15":"tag-tampa-headlines","16":"tag-tampa-news","17":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24059","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=24059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Love Thy Neighbor<\/a>\u00a0went from serving 1,000 people a month to 2,000 recently. They found a new, larger location just four blocks away
The problem – they had no way of moving the large freezers and refrigerators. The owner was panicked over what to do.\u00a0
\n
2 College Brothers Moving and Storage<\/a> offered to move them free of charge<\/p>\n