Helping a lot with a little

Tom Neve didn't have the money then, and he doesn't have the money now.

Still, Neve somehow manages to keep doing what he and the nine volunteers at Reaching-Out Community Services do - help hundreds of poor families in and around Bensonhurst survive by the skin of their teeth.

"We've come close to closing several times," Neve said. "The last time was last month, when the Independence Foundation gave us a grant to keep us open."

Neve, 45, is president of Reaching-Out, a very small - less than 600 square feet - food pantry on Bath Ave. in Bensonhurst. Half of that square footage is office; the other half a pantry chock-full of food, including cereal, dried beans, infant formula, rice and potatoes.

The pantry is so small it doesn't even have a coat closet.

"We converted the closet into a bathroom," Neve said. A sign on one wall warns office workers to turn off the heater before using the microwave oven.

Yet talk about cramming a lot into a small package! More than 800 families in eight communities - Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, Bay Ridge, Gravesend, Bath Beach, Brighton Beach, New Utrecht and Mapleton - depend on Reaching-Out for enough food to get them through the month.

Reaching-Out is a supermarket-type program. Unlike many shelters where families are given bags of food containing the same products, Reaching-Out lets families push a small shopping cart through the pantry, selecting the food they want from what is available.

The variety depends on the time of year and what is available from the group's suppliers - the Food Bank for New York City and other sponsors, including the United Way, U.S. Foodservices and City Harvest.

Neve said letting the customers select their food is more cost effective because "they get what they know they will eat. They don't take food that will just get thrown away because they don't eat it."

Customers - Neve insists they be called that so that coming to the pantry is more of a shopping experience - can get a month's worth of groceries in one trip, or return to the pantry every 15 days, Neve said.

"They go out of here carrying a bunch of bags," he said, as Joshua (Jesse) Lombardo, the group's vice president and program director, nodded in agreement.

Reaching-Out is Neve's brainchild. Born and raised in Bensonhurst, he's a graduate of Public School 205 and Roosevelt High School. He worked in various retail businesses, some of which he started, before landing a job with the city Sanitation Department on April 1, 1987.

"I was running a store when the Sanitation Department called me," Neve said. "I figured I'd have to be stupid to turn down a city job."

Though he now drives a sanitation truck through Kensington, when he started, Neve worked on the department's Neighborhood Intensive Cleaning Squad, or NICS, the unit that roamed a different Brooklyn neighborhood every two weeks cleaning up illegal dumping sites and abandoned buildings.

That's when Neve said he began to see the scope of the borough's homeless problem.

"I'd see them in these buildings or under bridges and places like that," he said. "People talk about poverty overseas, but you don't have to go that far to see real poverty. It's right here in our community."

Unlike many of us who part with the occasional pocket change or simply turn our heads when we come across our homeless fellow citizens, Neve decided to do something.

He took a second job, using the cash from that to buy a battered $1,500 van, which he outfitted with shelves. Working with a local church, Neve used his off hours to begin making the rounds of the places where he came across homeless folks while on the job, handing out blankets and health aids.

Soon he was handing out a few meals and helping folks find shelters for the night or rehabilitation programs. By 1992, Neve was looking for a small storefront where he could operate a food pantry.

Reaching-Out - he and Lombardo came up with the name - was incorporated as a nonprofit organization, and opened its doors at Utrecht Ave. and 79th St. that same year.

Sadly, lack of funds has forced the organization's van program to go on hiatus. The group doesn't do deliveries, which makes it more difficult for them to serve their elderly and homebound customers.

Volunteers, including Gracie Ovideo, Russell Kaiser, Anthony Shammah, Jean Lombardo and Linda Cona, man the pantry from Monday through Thursday - and restock the shelves on Friday. All work for free.

"They can ask to be paid, but we can't pay 'em," Neve laughed.

Many of the pantry's clients are single mothers trying to raise families - a situation that Neve appreciates. "My mother raised six of us," he said. "We were never hungry, but I remember those ketchup sandwiches."

His mother, Josephine, 78, now volunteers at the pantry.

The group continues to do referrals to various rehabilitation programs. They've had to turn down offers from Food Bank for New York City and City Harvest to host a nutritionist to lecture for Reaching-Out clients because the place is just too small.

Neve estimates that the pantry distributes more than $90,000 worth of food each year, and spends another $25,000 to rent the small storefront. Money for both comes from grants and beneficent donors, he said.

"We really do run this place on a shoestring," he said.

Yet Reaching-Out has almost closed its doors several times over the past few years. Neve said volunteers have often pooled their own money to keep the doors open, and even to buy the secondhand computer they use to keep track of the inventory.

Since we're entering the season of wishes, Neve and Reaching-Out have dreams of securing a van and a larger space. More realistically, the group is avidly seeking donations of money and food - particularly turkeys - that they can distribute during the holiday season.