When Marge Albaugh first set foot into what would become her
office for the next 20 years, she had no idea the amount of
potential St. Joseph’s Family Center held.
When Marge Albaugh first set foot into what would become her office for the next 20 years, she had no idea the amount of potential St. Joseph’s Family Center held.
What began as a hole-in-the-wall distribution center for clothes and groceries in East Gilroy evolved over four decades into an organization that has become the backbone of Gilroy’s social service offerings.
“We turned what had been a fly-by-night type of place into a regular business,” said Albaugh, who served as executive director for nearly 20 years.
Under Albaugh, the center grew from an operation run by the Catholic Ladies Aid Society and fueled largely by the goodwill and donations of the community into a full-fledged nonprofit organization with an annual budget of over $1 million. St. Joseph’s serves about 600 households, estimated David Cox, current CEO.
“Still, if not for the people of Gilroy, we never would have been able to make it what it is today,” Albaugh said. “Anything that came up, we worked together and it was the generosity of Gilroy that made it possible.”
With the help of her husband, John, and a faithful band of volunteers similar to the ones that still keep the center running, Albaugh turned the nunnery at St. Mary Parish into the St. Joseph’s Family Center offices complete with a waiting room and interviewing rooms. She began writing grants and establishing relationships with local businesses. Though Albaugh’s efforts were pro bono for years, she began to earn a modest paycheck and added a small staff in the early 1990s, she said.
About the same time Albaugh took the helm at St. Joseph’s, two other Gilroy women came up with the idea for the center’s Lord’s Table, a hot meals program St. Joseph’s runs for the homeless, over coffee. Alice Sousa and Louise Weske brainstormed the idea while chatting about the need for regular meals for the homeless in South County. With the guidance of Barry Del Buono, a former priest who founded a similar program in San Jose, the women held their first dinner in the St. Mary School gym March 6, 1983, Sousa said.
Without so much as a formal fundraiser or kickoff, the donations began pouring in, Sousa said. For the first meal, Gilroy Foods donated 25 turkeys, plenty of volunteers pitched in and about 30 members of the community showed up for a hot meal, she said.
“Everybody all chipped in their skills, Sousa said. “I have seven kids to I know how to cook big. But the amount of support the community provided was unbelievable. I was amazed at the people in this town who were donating.”
Sousa was delighted with how the community immediately got behind the effort to make the Lord’s Table a success. She said it’s a reminder that great things can happen when a community comes together.
A thrill of excitement still shoots up her spine every time she walks by the parish and sees the banner reminding passersby that St. Joseph’s is the home of the Lord’s Table.
“The Holy Spirit started it and it will run as long as it has to,” Sousa said. “This community made it all just fall into place.”
