On Oct. 15, the Alianza Center hosts its next Emergency Food Workshop at the Lealman Neighborhood Family Center in St. Petersburg. The session begins at 6 p.m. The workshops teach residents how to stock a pantry, preserve food, calculate how much water a household will need, and prepare meals when the electricity is gone.
The Alianza Center was founded in 2018 in response to Hurricane Maria, created to provide social services to Puerto Ricans and other Latino people displaced by the storm and resettled in Florida. Based in Orlando, the organization serves Hispanic communities, and the FEED project is one expression of that mission, translating the lessons of 2017 into practical skills families can use before the next storm arrives.
Eliseo Santana, the Alianza Center's Gulf Coast regional manager, has been the face of much of that work in Tampa Bay. In the aftermath of recent hurricanes, he collected hygiene products in his own living room to distribute to impacted families, and he has spoken publicly about why Latino communities often struggle to access help. Some residents are hesitant to ask for assistance or may not qualify for FEMA aid, he has said, while others are reluctant to leave neighborhoods they know even after losing their homes, worried about getting children to school or themselves to work without transportation. "Trust, education, teaching them how to be resilient," Santana said of his approach. "I'm blessed and I'm trying to give that blessing to others."
The food workshops are a direct extension of that philosophy. Participants learn to vacuum seal food to extend its shelf life, a technique that turns ordinary groceries into a longer-lasting reserve. They also receive information on how to keep using those skills at home.
The takeaway is unusually concrete. Santana said participants will leave with a vacuum seal machine of their own, so they can continue preparing food and potentially help neighbors do the same. By the end of the workshop, each family should have supplies for at least 30 emergency meals. The goal is not just individual readiness but a ripple effect: Santana hopes participants share what they learn with neighbors and loved ones, building a wider web of preparedness across the region.
The Lealman Neighborhood Family Center sits at 4255 56th Ave. N in St. Petersburg, in a part of unincorporated Pinellas County that has become a landing spot for immigrant families from across Asia and Latin America. The center, formally the Lealman and Asian Neighborhood Family Center, has long served a diverse community that includes Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong and Chinese residents alongside its newer Hispanic neighbors. It is the kind of place where a workshop on emergency food storage fits naturally into a broader mission of helping families navigate life in a new country.
That mission has taken on added weight in recent years. The Alianza Center organizes a Resilience Hub Network of more than 50 Florida nonprofits that serve Latino, Black, LGBTQ and immigrant communities, coordinating responses after hurricanes and other crises. Alianza director Marcos Vilar put it another way: rather than reacting to crisis in isolation, the network tries to connect nonprofit, business and government infrastructure ahead of time, so that when a storm hits, the pieces are already in place.
For families in Tampa Bay, the practical stakes are familiar. Hurricane season regularly leaves hundreds of thousands of households without power, sometimes for days, and the region's large Spanish-speaking population can face language barriers when seeking official guidance. A workshop conducted in both English and Spanish, with equipment to take home and a target of 30 meals per family, addresses both problems at once.
The Oct. 15 session at the Lealman center is free and open to the community.