Paul Szmal: It is 8.39 on FLX Morning on Finger Lakes News Radio. Sun and clouds and a temperature at 63. And I'm happy to be joined by the Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Finger Lakes, Frank Capozzi, is here with us this morning. Good morning sir, how are you?
Frank Capozzi: I'm wonderful, good morning Paul, great to be here with you.
Paul Szmal: Yes, and it's good to have you and a chance to kind of recap what Catholic Charities does to kind of start off the conversation here.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, no great, yeah, I mean we love being here to talk about what we do and share with the community. We work of course here in Geneva but throughout all of Ontario County, Yates, Seneca, Wayne, and Cayuga counties delivering a wide variety of services, whether they're helping people meet their basic needs, mental health services, all kinds of different things that we can deliver on a daily basis.
Paul Szmal: How long is the Catholic Charities organization been doing all of this?
Frank Capozzi: So Catholic Charities of the Finger Lakes was established in 1982 here in Geneva as our main office, and then as time has evolved kind of our footprint expanded into other counties to continue to deliver services, and we're part of an incredibly powerful network of Catholic Charities agencies that serves 12 counties in upstate New York.
Paul Szmal: Wow, that's a busy, busy, busy, busy.
Frank Capozzi: It is, it's very busy. You know we're very fortunate we've got great partner agencies in the southern tier, an incredible partner that delivers services primarily in Monroe County to the Rochester region, and we get our Finger Lakes piece and we all work together to deliver just what I consider to be some of the highest quality services imaginable in the human services sector to help people in their daily lives to do better, but really without coming and doing things like this people don't hear much about us.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and I'm curious as to how is this all funded just by donations?
Frank Capozzi: It's a mixture. So we have grants from private funders, we have grants from state and federal funding as well, we have a lot of private contributions that support it, so it's this big melting pot of contributions that come in to help us get this work done. So it's a conglomeration effort that brings the money in, and then it's kind of a conglomeration effort of the Catholic Charities staff to provide all these different services.
Paul Szmal: Exactly, and no one really, I mean no one day is the same, every day is different, and everyone has a different hand, and you know one of our our initial services that we started was the Community Lunch Program here in Geneva. Depending on what a listener may, how they may have interacted with the Lunch Program, they'll connect to a different staff member. We have Robert Vona, who's the program director, who's there every day, but if someone isn't going in and helping to prepare a meal, they might work with Rhonda in our office because they're a food, they don't eat food, or they help to organize fundraising events or other programs related to the Lunch Program. So it's this really great team of folks that we're blessed to have to help our folks in our region.
Frank Capozzi: And what is the Geneva Lunch Program all about?
Paul Szmal: So the Geneva Lunch Program is five days a week, Monday through Friday. We are really in a great partnership for many, many years with the First United Methodist Church here in Geneva. They host the site, the kitchen is in their basement, so folks will think of them and think of us with this program. You can come in, 1145, doors open, they're open for about 45 minutes or so to an hour. Folks come in, get a fresh, nutritious, hot meal, Monday through Friday, year-round. Thanksgiving, we're open, we're serving turkey. Christmas falls on a Tuesday, we're there, we're open, meal served. So we're there, as I said, five days a week, and we are really fortunate to have an incredible team every day of about 10 to 12 volunteers that come in, help Robert. Robert, I call him the conductor. Robert kind of lays it all out as to what the results should be. These volunteers work with him, follow his lead, and get it all done and served, and then cleaned up afterwards, and it's a really fast-paced program, nine o'clock to one o'clock.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, you know, I have actually volunteered for that once, went over one day and took part in that, and it is amazing. That's like a well-oiled machine, how that operates.
Frank Capozzi: It is. We've got these really awesome teams every day but Thursday, so Thursday's Community Day. So lots of different groups, Rotary, Hobart and William Smith College, local businesses come in on Thursdays, but Monday through Wednesday and Friday have these long-term dedicated teams, and other volunteers will come in and plug in with them, but these core teams, those four days a week, they just get it knocked right out.
Paul Szmal: We're talking with Frank Capozzi, he's the Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Finger Lakes, and right now we're talking about the Geneva Community Lunch Program. I was stunned to see the numbers for 2024 and how many meals were actually served.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, 2024 was huge, about 25,000 meals served during the course of the year. That's a combination of folks coming in, sitting down, having a meal, and then also we do some to-go meals as well. So folks who can't physically get into the site, we'll let people take them to them. Occasionally we can do some delivery with arrangement, but it's just a staggering number and it continues to climb every year.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, it's over 25,000 meals.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, we saw a huge increase too in 2024 in senior citizens coming to the lunch program. For the first time in a long time that number really spiked up.
Paul Szmal: Right, right. Now there's a fundraising event that's coming up on September 4th and that's to benefit this community, this community lunch program.
Frank Capozzi: It is, it's the Community Lunch Party, which will be held at Geneva on the Lake September 4th. It's gonna be a great night. Geneva on the Lake has been dedicated to the lunch program and helping us raise needed funds for many years. We used to do an event called the Hoedown for Hunger there for a long time. Two years ago we celebrated our 40th birthday, so we had a big birthday party at Geneva on the Lake for the 40th celebration for the lunch program, but we've just kept that party atmosphere going the last several years. It's gonna be a great night, great food. Karen Clark, the lead singer of Night Train, is gonna be DJing and also performing a little bit. So great entertainment and it's only 40 bucks to come out and support the lunch program.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, that is a great way to support the program is whenever you see fundraisers like this that involve good food, great entertainment, and a respectable price. $40 is not that much for what's being offered for the day.
Frank Capozzi: No, it's not. We've tried to keep it very affordable so that anybody who wants to come and support the lunch program can come and we'll have some other fun things going on during the course of the evening as well.
Paul Szmal: I want to shift gears here and talk about something that happened a while ago now, but the relief efforts still continue and Catholic Charities is still very tightly involved in the Ovid community based on the fire that happened there earlier this year.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, we have been partnered with the United Way of Seneca County since the evening of the fire to manage a large amount of funding. We've got a hundred and ninety thousand that has come in to us to help from the community to support relief efforts. Since the last time I was here talking about it, we've spent just an enormous amount of that fund out into the community in a lot of ways. We did contribute towards from the fund to do the cleanup effort to get the site cleared out. We did environmental testing coverage for that. We've done individual supports paying water bills, gas and electric bills, rents, security deposits, food vouchers. We've given out gift cards to help people fill their gas tanks so they can go out to job interviews. I mean there's been literally nothing that we haven't had a little bit of a hand in with this. We still have funding left and we're excited to be working with the United Way and then also strategically with community leaders in Ovid to help figure out what we can do next because as we're getting into this colder part of the year, needs are going to continue to rise and we're at the ready to assist.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, and we should emphasize the work here is far from over.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, I think a lot of folks looked at it, you know, in that first maybe three months, six months window and it's just human nature, right? Our attention outside of that immediate area has probably shifted for a lot of people, but the work is going to have a ripple effect for years just alone from the single impact of the loss of the Big M.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, yeah, the loss not only of a community grocery store but the loss of the jobs that were a part of that and I mean, you know, that place was an integral part of a small community and to have that gone now is...
Frank Capozzi: Right, and it's not just for us, we've seen the impact not just when you take a look at Ovid, right? The loss of the grocery store in Ovid but then rippling out to all the small communities around Ovid that depended on the Big M as well to have access to fresh food every day. We really are going to have a big part working with the community to figure out what the next steps are. We had a, we were really happy to be able, before the farmers market opened, we partnered with United Way to help get the mobile food pantry from FoodLink out so that there was at least fresh produce and fresh meat and dairy coming in a couple of times a month. We're looking to continue to potentially do that as well as a lot of other things, so there's a lot more to come in Ovid in that support.
Paul Szmal: So how long do you think that recovery process is going to take based on, I mean you've got your hands in it it seems like almost on a daily basis.
Frank Capozzi: We do, I mean it's hard to say because the needs are going to persist. As long as there's not a grocery store until a long-term kind of solution to how do we get food into the community on a regular basis is solved, we're going to need to be there. But there's so many other items that are going to pop up along the way. So we've had all kinds of stuff that has come up in this that we've never dealt with before. But we're very fortunate at Catholic Charities, we have a long time history responding to emergency situations, so we have a lot of resources not only financially but also kind of structurally behind us to help us assess and deliver service.
Paul Szmal: And a lot of these services, are these delivered by volunteers?
Frank Capozzi: A lot of times it's volunteers. We have in our, so for our agency, our five counties, we have less than 40 employees. That's a mix of full and part-time people delivering services. So we depend upon our agency council, which is a group of about 15 people that are with us all the time to deliver strategic service. But then outside of that we have hundreds of volunteers between the lunch program, we operate a clothing center in Wolcott, and then local volunteers who come together around pressing issues like this that come up.
Paul Szmal: And I imagine that need for volunteers never goes away.
Frank Capozzi: Never goes away. If anyone is ever interested in devoting some of their precious time to help Catholic Charities deliver our mission, you can call our office, you can send us an email through our website, we would find a spot for you to volunteer.
Paul Szmal: And if people want to find out more information about volunteering, how do they do that?
Frank Capozzi: They can go to catholiccharitiesfl.org, which is our website, or they can call our office which is 315-789-2235. And the same information if somebody wants to make a donation?
Paul Szmal: If somebody wants to make a donation, you want to get a reservation in for the community lunch party, everything can go to that phone number or website.
Frank Capozzi: All right. Frank, thanks so much for coming in and updating us. Really appreciate it.
Paul Szmal: Thank you for having me.
Frank Capozzi: Yeah, absolutely. It is 851 on FLX Morning.
