Taylor lends helping hand to Soup kitchen
Fri, 2015-10-30 05:00
News Staff
By LYNETTE SOWELL
City council place 1 candidate Azeita “Z” Taylor held a different type of meet and greet for her campaign on Tuesday afternoon.
“Everybody wanted me to do a meet and greet, but everybody who knows me, knows I don’t sit down for long,” Taylor said. “It’s great to sit down and have conversations with people, but showing them what you do is a better way to that. As a city councilman, you’re a representative of the city at large.”
Taylor extended invitations to volunteer at the Copperas Cove Soup Kitchen. She had scheduled the event for Saturday afternoon, but it was postponed due to weather. The idea behind the event was to pitch in and help the soup kitchen, but Taylor was also on hand to talk with voters as everyone worked together
On Tuesday, Taylor, along with her family and other supporters, as well as some passersby spent time scraping the building’s trim and repainting it, as well as making some needed repairs to the ADA ramp at the front of the building and repainting the ramp as well.
The event will continue tomorrow from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m., Taylor said, with the goal to help clean up and reorganize the supplies and pantry.
Taylor, who is also the marketing director for Copperas Cove’s Chick-fil-A, found the idea of volunteering at the soup kitchen a natural transition. For over a year, the first Wednesday of the month is Chick-fil-A day at the soup kitchen, when the restaurant provides sandwiches for the soup kitchen that day.
Another way the restaurant has recently begun to donate is by delivering weekly contributions of leftovers that are still perfectly edible, but would have been thrown away.
“We just started it. It’s taken us a year. Chick-Fil-A has an organization that helps with that, the liability portion and setting it up with the nonprofits,” Taylor said.
Among the volunteers and supporters on Tuesday afternoon was Ben Eseroma, owner of CrossFit Beyond Limits, along with three others who work out at the gym.
“We’re about to replace the ramp, it’ll take us an hour, hour and a half,” said Eseroma. “My grandfather said it’s the little things that count. This ramp might be a little thing, but it’ll make the soup kitchen look good. She contacted us and asked, ‘Can you do something?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, you let me know what you want us to do. We’re part of a community. People say they want to make a change, and this is where change starts.”
Whether or not she wins the election on Tuesday, Taylor wants to continue having events like this to help better the community.
“I would like to the civic groups and businesses get together in unity. If they all came together on one project, we could be done with it and move on. We could tackle a lot of things that are lacking. We’re just all separate right now. If we could just come together collectively and do that. I want to promote unity in the community that way,” Taylor said.
The soup kitchen has also received some vital donations as Taylor put the word out about her event. An anonymous donor ordered a refrigerator and stove from Centex Appliance Repair on Georgetown Road. Another individual made a $250 cash donation, helping Taylor halfway to her goal of raising $500 for the soup kitchen during the event. The Copperas Cove Optimist Club also donated supplies and food to the kitchen. Patrick Robertson, who runs the soup kitchen, called it all a blessing.