With the cooperation of Herb White, who was still serving as president of Feed the Hungry, and with the Vestry’s official request to Tony, they put together a plan to raise money. Since San Miguel was a community of artists, Tony asked a local artist and a St. Paul’s parishioner, I.J. Kuehn, to put together a Christmas appeal. She came up with “Open Your Heart to Feed the Hungry.”

“Then we needed a clear mission statement, needed to follow that statement, and to stay focused.” In the February, 1996, in files that were signed by C. Anthony Adlerbert, there is the first statement: The mission of the St. Paul’s Feed Program shall be to provide one balanced meal per day, five days a week on regular school days throughout the regular school year, to nutritionally deprived children of elementary and pre-school age in San Miguel de Allende, Gto., Mexico.

Next, Tony began to separate Feed the Hungry from St. Paul’s Church. “Feed the Hungry had to have greater appeal to people outside of St. Paul’s – to Catholics, Jews, and non-denominational people – to be able to make it.”

Meanwhile, Shirley arrived. She had been the head of human relations at an Atlanta manufacturing company and had thought she’d work with the elderly once she moved to San Miguel. As chance would have it, her arrival coincided with Alice Foster Minton’s leaving her position with Feed the Hungry. Tony asked Shirley to take over.

Once Shirley made the commitment, the Adlerberts were at it full time. Shirley said, “I met Olivia, I loved the children, and I never left. Olivia and I were joined at the hip from then on.” At that time, Olivia didn’t drive a car, so Shirley drove her to the kitchens twice a week. It was a successful partnership. “I taught Olivia about business and she taught me about the Mexican culture.”

“We’d drive to rural areas to interview women who had applied to be cooks. If their own kitchen wasn’t clean, we wouldn’t hire them. Sometimes we climbed over hedges and ran through fields with pigs around. Occasionally it would occur to me, ‘If the corporate world could see me now!’ Olivia and I would spend two days a week in the car, another day and a half doing bookkeeping. The payroll was done with cash in envelopes. The rest of the time was spent packing up the food and then delivering it, sometimes with the food on our backs. Once we were terrified by river water coming over the windshield of the car.” Shirley took a deep breath. “And the worst part was that we had to go back the same way we arrived.”

Feed the Hungry has always relied on a bodega – a storage area for food – but the early one was “a rat-infested place by the railroad tracks.” Fortunately, the Adlerberts had become acquainted with Arthur and Carol Kornhaber of Ojai, California. After Tony helped them build their house on the corner of Las Moras and Cinco de Mayo, the Kornhabers became so fond of Feed the Hungry that they eventually donated their house to the organization. This generous donation in the late ‘90s allowed Feed the Hungry to finally store the food in a clean location. To improve the situation even more, the Adlerberts bought the property next door and donated that building to Feed the Hungry as well.

Feed the Hungry began to experience a rapid growth and was creating two to three kitchens a year. Tony was doing everything possible to “get recognition, to network, to create Christmas and holiday appeals, to have auctions, raffles, and to sell cookbooks, everything for our company.”

Back in the VCR days, one of the San Miguel supporters was Gene Crane, who had been a radio announcer with CBS in Philadelphia. “Gene did a fund raising video with his terrific voice. We gave it to prospective donors. A big hit.”

A touching experience happened in 2001. Tony gave a speech at a cabaret fundraiser that Judy Marzulli put on at the old Jacaranda (now the Hotel Matilda). Tony proudly announced that Feed the Hungry was building its twelfth kitchen at La Cuadrilla. After the cabaret performance, Horst Tutepastell approached him and asked if he and his wife Stephanie could pay for that kitchen. “No, no, we already have a donor,” Tony said. “Well,” Horst said, “the number 12 is important to us because that’s how old our daughter was when she died.” The switch was made, Horst and Stephanie adopted Kitchen Number 12 at La Cuadrilla, and Horst went on to serve several years as a Trustee of Feed the Hungry.

Tony went out of his way to meet interested parties. “I was the first to meet Mike and Peter Chadwick. I remember taking them around and dropping them off in the Jardín. They said they’d be in touch and handed me $500 in cash. That was the beginning of their sponsorship of our kitchen at Los Ricos de Abajo and a long good relationship.” Tony and Shirley remember fondly Carol and Gene Francis who asked that no one in their family give each other Christmas presents and instead pool their money. Their combined Christmas funds built the Alcocer kitchen.

Forever the businessman and always looking at the bottom line, Tony met an executive from a soda pop company. After listening to Feed the Hungry’s mission and goals, the man said, “I can get you a lot of money.” Tony, never shy, said, “$200,000?” The man confidently answered, “Sure can.” It wasn’t long before the catch became obvious: the company’s logo on top of every Feed the Hungry kitchen tinaco. “Can’t do it,” Tony said. “That would contradict everything we stand for. Adios.”

The Adlerberts did accept help from Kimberly Clarke, however, through one of the company’s Mexican executives. One day, good to the company’s word, a huge tractor/trailer pulled up in front of Feed the Hungry’s Las Moras office for the Adlerberts and Olivia to unload. Toilet paper, soap dispensers (but no additional soap), and paper towel dispensers (but no additional paper towels) filled the truck, and as the Adlerberts unloaded the items, they quickly realized they’d have to give many items away. There was no spot in the budget for the soap for the dispensers or for the paper towels.

But Tony had other ways of making money, or so he thought. He and Shirley had been invited to Coral Gables, Florida, by someone who said, “I have all these friends with tons of money.” So the Adlerberts and Josee and Eduardo Cvercko made the trip and attended a gala event at a huge house in a gated community. They had not realized that it was someone’s birthday celebration. As the cocktail time ended and just before the meal was to begin, the host grabbed Tony’s hand and introduced him by saying, “Tony wants to talk about Feed the Hungry.” The second the introduction stopped, a woman yelled, “I’m hungry. When are we gonna eat?” And that was it. People moved to the dinner tables. Shirley said, “We didn’t make a dime.” Tony added, “Not spit.”

Not to be defeated, however, they drove to York, Maine, hoping to expand Feed the Hungry’s family of donors. Tony had accepted an invitation to speak at St. George’s Episcopal Church. While talking about one of the many benefits of Feed the Hungry, he said, “One of the wonderful things we do is hire women who have never worked before.” It wasn’t long before he realized that he should have said: “women who haven’t been paid to work before” but the moment was gone. The women in the congregation didn’t wait long to let him know what he had said wrong.

As Tony had predicted, Feed the Hungry did make contact with people from other religions. An English-speaking couple, parishioners at Las Monjas, approached Feed the Hungry to see if the “company” could help the nuns feed street people. The deal took a year to negotiate due to the nuns being cloistered, but eventually an agreement was struck: the nuns would re-do their kitchen, Feed the Hungry would provide the food, and the nuns would feed people from their door on Calle Quebrada in the Centro. When the Adlerberts, Cverckos, and Armand and Stephanie Cimino entered the convent, they were the first lay people given admission in 46 years. The nuns sang songs, played the guitar for them, and promised to pray for the six of them every day. (The Adlerberts hope they’re keeping their promise!) Postscript: As the years passed, the nuns stopped feeding the indigent from their kitchen, and as a result, Feed the Hungry no longer supplies food.

The Adlerberts remember going with Father Michael Long to visit the Casa Hogar Don Bosco at Mexiquito, an orphanage for boys. When they asked the Mother Superior where she received her food, she said, “We beg for it at the markets. We ask for the food that is so spoiled that it won’t sell.” Stunned, Tony and Father Long promised her that they’d never have to beg again. They made good on their promise. Although initially there was no kitchen, the Cverckos provided the funds to build one, and from then on, Feed the Hungry provided the food. The nuns would beg no more.

In the late ‘90s, Tony went to visit the Emiliano Zapata school. He thought to himself that it definitely looked like a school that could use Feed the Hungry’s help. Then he noticed two little girls with their pants down defecating outside the school. He started to walk into what he now calls the “pooping fields” and saw human feces everywhere. It was as if animals had been in a pen and no one had ever cleaned it. He knew that if Feed the Hungry opened a kitchen there, the bathroom situation would have to be corrected. The budget, however, presented a small problem: no money for a septic system and bathroom. He contacted a small private group, the Temple Foundation, and with their help, the Emiliano Zapata school had a bathroom.

Shirley is proud of starting the cooks’ luncheon. “These ladies cook all year long. Can we do something for them?” she asked, and with that, the luncheons started. The first one was at Bugambilia restaurant and all the cooks were presented with gifts. “They were not accustomed to having anyone else cook for them. So we arranged for that to happen. They were asked to stand up, to give their name, their village, and how many children they had, and how many they fed. I remember that at the first luncheon, one cook was so nervous that she mumbled, but the next year, she jumped out of her seat and spoke with confidence. Those are good memories.”

Many incidences stand out in Shirley’s years with Feed the Hungry. “Some mothers told Olivia and me that they wanted to talk with us at the school. Not knowing what the mothers wanted to say, we were worried. It turned out that the mothers asked us to come so that they could tell us that they were so happy with what Feed the Hungry was doing for their children. It happened more than once. It keeps you going. When mothers and teachers tell you that, you just don’t walk away.”

“There is no way to imagine the experience of working in a Feed the Hungry kitchen in a rancho. When you hand the children a plate or a cup….” Shirley’s voice broke. “All I can say is that working with Feed the Hungry opened up my heart to giving a lot more. It changed the way we live and see things.” She looked at Tony. “It brought us back to earth.”
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Shirley observed, “Everything has a life.” She gradually became more of an “in-house” volunteer doing accounting, payroll, annual reports, and thank-yous.” Deanna Hamersley started driving Olivia and Barbara Hoyler volunteered to write the thank-you letters.

The Adlerberts eventually felt that Feed the Hungry was “too much Tony and Shirley, too much of us.” In 2004 they were able to “pull back” on their participation.

Feed the Hungry’s rapid growth continued. Computers came into the daily workings of Feed the Hungry and volunteers streamlined the bodega and food delivery operation. Room was made for professional advancement for the cooks, and salaries improved. With the support of the Chadwick family, an English program began at the Los Ricos de Abajo school that has expanded and now includes an expanded teaching program, scholarships, a library, and a Learning Center.

When the Adlerberts said they were “pulling back” on their participation, that didn’t mean they quit. Shirley was on the cookbook committee and still plays a large role in all the events. Tony is on the executive committee of the Board of Trustees. “They won’t let me go,” he said with a laugh. Then, with more seriousness, he added, “Feed the Hungry is like a child. So much love and affection and degree of satisfaction. I’ll be there until I’m no longer here.”

Shirley summed up the Adlerbert experience: “We were in on the ground floor of Feed the Hungry, involved emotionally and physically. We filled the envelopes for people to be paid and handed them to them, we knew all the cooks, and had a real feel for everyone we worked with, including the children. There was a little boy in San Cristóbal who tugged on my leg, eyes big with wonderment, and asked, ‘Are you going to feed us every day?’”

Her answer: Yes, we are. Every day that you come to school, and I’m sure you’ll be in school more often than before.”