Blue Water Woman -- Winter 2019

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PASSIONfor peopleBY PATTI SAMARFor six years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Alice Rieves owned arestaurant in St. Clair called, appropriately, “Alice’s Restaurant.”After retiring as the executive director of the Mid City Nutrition Programin 2016, Rieves has once again joined the organization and has been namedinterim executive director of Mid City Nutrition, as the organization movesforward with its plans to construct a new home for its soup kitchen on thesouth side of Port Huron.Aptly, the new building could also be called “Alice’s Restaurant” becauseif anyone knows the recipe for success when working with donors and thepopulation that Mid City Nutrition serves, it is Rieves.After a long-term career in the food service industry that saw her owning,managing and waitressing, Rieves was named the first paid director at MidCity Nutrition in 1993.“I was working at Manis’s Restaurant and I remember looking out thewindow at all of these lost people,” she said. “I saw the sadness and despair intheir faces.”She began volunteering at the Mid City Nutrition soup kitchen severaldays a week, which eventually led to her employment there.“We had no money,” she said of her early days there. “The church (wherethe soup kitchen is located) had never, ever charged rent, and a few times, wehad to borrow money from the church.“We prayed and said, ‘If God wants this to continue, he will show us theway.”Apparently God did, indeed, want the soup kitchen to continue.“I got a call from a woman who said, ‘I heard you don’t have anymoney…’” Rieves went to meet with the woman, who offered a donation.She was shocked when she was handed a check for $20,000.“Money just started to come in the door,” Rieves said. “I said, ‘I guess Godwants us here, so we’re going to continue.’”A native of Georgia, Rieves moved around to several different states whileshe was growing up, and eventually landed in Michigan in the late 1970s.She raised her children in St. Clair County and has called this communityhome ever since.“I think that in life, God has a plan, and that was His plan to get me hereto do what I’m doing, working with the soup kitchen.”After her retirement in 2016, Rieves worked part time for a while, but soonfelt the call back to Mid City Nutrition.“I didn’t realize how much I missed my peeps and the whole organization,”she said. “It’s my passion. It’s something that I strongly believe in.“Hunger is a basic need, and we have all experienced hunger to a certaindegree…that little growling in our bellies that says ‘I need food.’“But there’s more to being hungry than that growling. People areimportant. There’s spiritual hunger, there’s emotional and mental hunger.“If you see each one of those people at the soup kitchen as a person, thenthat makes a difference. Give them a firm handshake and look them in theeye. That gives them validation.”Rieves is looking forward to working with the community, movingforward with raising funds and constructing the new building.“We can get that building built and add some stability to the organization,”she said. “I’ve worked very hard to be a good fiduciary steward of the donormoney.“There are a lot of people in this community who care. There is notanother community in the state that is as giving as St. Clair County.”ALICE RIEVES4 WINTER 2019 BLUEWATERWOMAN.COM
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Blue Water Woman -- Winter 2019

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