(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

support for this community focused program was generously provided by Tampa General Hospital.

Florida Blue, Neilson, The Bank of Tampa, Ultimate Medical Academy, The Bernard F. And Mary Ann Powell Foundation the duPont Registry, Warren Averett, and the Tampa Bay Times.

- Next on "Be More Unstoppable" an unprecedented pandemic has forced the Bay area non-profits to make dramatic changes.

Demand for services is up and traditional operational models have flown out the window.

Whether it's feeding the poor, providing healthcare, working in education or serving those with special needs, our community has come together to go above and beyond.

It's a story of exceptional resilience and spirit.

Next on Be More Unstoppable.

♪ I'm gonna be unstoppable ♪ - For 15 years, WEDU has presented the Be More Awards recognizing the powerful work of the nonprofit organizations in our community.

But 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic brought unparalleled change.

in the interest of safety, we decided not to host a live award ceremony.

Instead, we salute all nonprofits and the extraordinary efforts each has made during a year of hardship.

In this program, we'll visit some of our past winners and other nonprofits that have made a major impact on West Central Florida in the age of COVID.

These are their stories.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm Stacey Brandt.

Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Tampa General Hospital.

As the region's largest academic medical center the health and wellbeing of our community is critical.

Our vision is to become the safest and most innovative healthcare system in America.

We heal, we teach, we innovate.

Care for everyone every day.

That's why we are proud to sponsor the WEDU Be More Unstoppable Broadcast and celebrate the incredible work in the areas of public and mental health care.

Thank WEDU TV and congrats to all the nonprofit organizations nominated tonight.

- The COVID pandemic has brought unprecedented strains on the healthcare system.

Here are a few organizations helping people in crisis and in need of basic health care.

- Crisis Center of Tampa Bay has been part of our community for over 49 years.

And our mission is to ensure that no one in our community has to face crisis alone.

We are the community's gateway to help, hope and healing in a time of crisis.

And the access point to that gateway is a very simple phone number called 211.

We also partner with the National Suicide Prevention Helpline.

We saw those numbers kind of ebb and flow during the year with spikes in the months of June and November of community members that were calling because they were suicidal.

We run a trauma counseling program in four locations across our community.

During the pandemic we had to pivot from in-person services to remote services, and we've been providing between 180 and 190 therapy sessions every week since the start of the pandemic utilizing teletherapy and the results have been phenomenal.

we move and we're able to provide mobile COVID testing to home bound elderly individuals in assisted living facilities.

I think we can all agree that COVID-19 has been a crisis in our community.

And I'm so proud that the Crisis Center Tampa Bay has been able to be a partner in our community solution to that.

- The Spring of Tampa Bay has been the provider of comprehensive domestic violence services in our community for almost 45 years.

We want to let everyone in our community know that there is a safe place to go when their relationship is no longer safe.

You can come to us for shelter.

You can come to us for legal services.

And we have a whole host of other programs and services designed to keep survivors safe to help their children.

And to let the community know that we are always here 24 hours a day seven days a week.

From day one of COVID we've remained open with our core services.

And so we had to very quickly pivot and figure out how to do that safely.

All of the challenges that we're seeing in our community related to COVID are amplified when you're also experiencing domestic violence.

Our team has really worked hard to make sure to the extent that we're able, that we are providing services that meet the needs of survivors, even during the pandemic.

It's been challenging, but we've been really appreciating the way that the community is still rallied because our doors still need to be open.

Survivors are still needing to flee, and we still need the money to be able to operate every day.

- The St Petersburg Free Clinic is here to support our neighbors in need in Pinellas County through a few core programs, including the county's largest food bank, our own food pantry.

We also provide support for water bills people obtaining IDs.

We have our health care clinic, which is the program on which we were founded, which provides healthcare primary care services and other services for folks who lack health insurance elsewhere.

Pre COVID, we were serving anywhere from 5,500 to 6,500 individuals a month in our We Help food pantry.

We are now serving an average of 19,000 people per month.

So we found ourselves with severely limited capacity to serve patients.

We did not have the PPE that we needed to safely do so.

And so we went to a telehealth model while we figured out how to safely open a brick and mortar clinic.

After about 60 days, we've had the PPE that we needed in place.

We had a rotation of providers who felt like they could safely come serve patients.

And we put other safety protocols in place to keep our staff, providers, volunteers, and patients safe.

We are able to do what we do because of the support of our incredible community, our donors our volunteers, our partners.

And we're just so grateful.

- Here at Tampa Family Health Centers.

Our mission is to provide a quality, caring and accessible healthcare to a culturally diverse community.

We are an organization that is here to be a patient centered medical home for our families.

And our focus is on the medically underinsured.

Our patients who are homeless are individuals that do not have the ability to have insurance.

And we also look to work to support the health of the community.

Although we had, none of us had faced a global pandemic of this size or scale.

We had a really fortunate to have a team here that was able to ready up the troops and get us standing up lines of service that we'd never done before we brought up telehealth.

We brought up teledentistry and we brought up telepsychiatry 'cause we certainly know the effects of COVID are far reaching.

That our patients need to still come in for their primary care visits.

We don't want them going without care and we certainly don't want them unnecessarily having to go to the emergency room.

So it was key and important to us to make sure that we have the safest environment for our patients so they can continue to receive care.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm David Pizzo from Florida Blue.

Our mission is simple yet bold to help people and communities achieve better health.

We strive to make healthcare more accessible and affordable for all.

Everyone deserves to be healthy but the truth is hunger, homelessness, and poverty rob, many residents have that chance.

That's why Florida Blue is proud to sponsor the WEDU Be More Unstoppable Award.

Honoring everyday heroes taking on these tough issues.

- In 2020, we saw our economy turned upside down and thousands lost their jobs.

with that, the need for feeding the hungry and providing for the homeless skyrocketed.

- Mr. Bubblez is for shower services.

What's unique about Mr. Bubblez is that we are mobile.

A lot of times our clients come to utilize our service and we find that it just brings a little hope to their eyes after they've taken a good hot shower.

Well, the pandemic definitely has brought some changes to a lot of services and Mr Bubblez, We have to do a little adjustment as well especially because we are exposed to people's fluid by them taking showers and things of that nature.

And we also have come up with a new way to serve the community is coming up with healthcare hygiene bags.

We are looking for the community to support us and to continue to support us.

And we welcome your monetary inclined or just wanna volunteer.

That'd be great.

- At Metropolitan Ministries, we focused on alleviating suffering, promoting dignity and instilling self-sufficiency for poor and homeless families.

When COVID hit.

It was a real challenge for us 'cause we have these 140 families to care for.

We have to be here 24 hours a day.

Food services can't stop.

Hunger relief was a big challenge obviously.

When we first started, we had enough food in a warehouse to build 3,000 food boxes.

We ended up building 106,000 food boxes.

So we were busy.

We told stories on our social media channels and the community responded that allowed us to spend well over $4 million and unbudgeted expenses.

Either in food purchases or rent assistance.

In spite of COVID, we still had 13,000 plus volunteers come alongside us and help us.

We're not out of this.

And we're gonna stay very much focused to go to where the need is.

We know that there are certain communities where the needs are twice as great.

And we wanna work in those communities to help inspire hope to those communities and those people that are hurting the most.

- Feeding Tampa Bay has an objective and that's a hunger free Tampa Bay.

And what that means is everybody has access to the food and resources they need to live the lives that all of us should and want to live.

We serve a 10 County area .

Right now there are about a million people who are food insecure of the four plus million in net population base.

We partner with over 500 different charitable agencies and enjoy the support of 50 to 60,000 volunteers a year.

And we're funded through the generosity of our community.

So when COVID hit, we leased more trucks and we got a temp truck drivers.

All so that we could be prepared to serve our community over the longer term.

Originally our meal output was somewhere around a million meals a week.

Our goal right away was to try and double that.

Because at the onset of COVID our demand was up 400% in the first two months.

It was just crazy.

You probably saw pictures of people in cars in our lines that snaked for miles or we would see 4,000 families in one particular distribution.

We have a fundamental and foundational belief that I know almost everyone shares, which is everything good in life starts around the table with meal.

- The Kind Mouse feeds the chronically hungry and food insecure children of Pinellas County.

What makes the Kind Mouse different is that we have kids feeding kids.

These are children who work in the community.

They start at age five and they run their own board.

And they're learning how to run the nonprofit.

And to date, we have fed over 488,000 little tummies.

Well, when COVID hit, as we all know, that was overnight.

So what we did was we partnered up with the St Pete Police Department who helped deliver over 6,000 meals.

We spoke with all of the agencies that we were working with and what they did was they did drive-bys where they would put food outside their doors, and then the families would come and pick up the food.

Being able to think outside the box and having such great relationships with our agencies, no child went hungry that we knew of.

- Second Chance Last Opportunity mission is to provide a gateway of hope for individuals that are in crisis.

So we want to be able to empower them build their self-esteem, self-worth, self-confidence.

The pandemic had changed that we end up being an emergency food pantry which started off with individuals and people that was lost and walking in an unknown didn't know nothing about this pandemic.

Which was this COVID-19.

I think we all were.

Just we were all lost with this things.

We had children coming up asking for something to eat because the parent was trying to adjust to what was going on, parents and the children were hungry.

It's so important that we all take the time out and take a look around and observe the moment of, "It could have been me.

"It could have been my family member.

"It could have been someone that you knew real close."

But everyone needs that second chance at life.

But at that moment, during the pandemic we were all at second chance, individual.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm Amy Rettig.

Senior Vice President of Community Engagement at Nielsen.

When companies and advertisers are truly connected to their audiences they can see the most important opportunities and accelerate growth through Nielsen products and services.

All good work, deserves recognition.

That's why we are proud to sponsor the WEDU Be More Unstoppable Broadcast and celebrate the amazing work that nonprofit organizations have done around Tampa Bay.

- Animal shelters and training facilities provide us with furry companions and work dogs that benefit lives.

In challenging times they stepped up to strengthen the human animal bond.

(upbeat music) - Friends of Strays was organized in 1978 and where the first make shift shelter in St Petersburg Florida.

And we are actually on a mission to save all of their homeless and abandoned animals throughout North County and beyond.

Last year when we actually had to shut down for a couple of months.

We put out a call to the community to help us get all of the animals into either adopted homes or in the foster homes.

And people just really either got a call.

They came out of the woodwork and came over to adopt and foster, and we got all of our animals out and we were empty for about two months, even though, you know people are struggling financially and some of the businesses are struggling financially here locally.

We really found that the community has stepped up to help out in the areas that they really care about.

And St. Peter in particular is very well known as a pet friendly city.

Our priorities as a community, really lie with them on how we take care of our pets.

We always like to say, we're looking for people to find talent and treasure.

It's not always just about their money but also about what they can offer volunteer wise to help support our programs as well.

- The majority of the animals that we take care of our cats and dogs, but we also, do wildlife.

One of the things that we try to do is get the animals in get them out into foster homes.

They do better being in a foster home rather than being out to shelter.

And then at that point in time we can develop their personality the fosters develop a personality and then they can tell us things about the cats or dogs that we didn't know before they went into the foster home.

And so it makes an ex stop finding the cats or dogs a forever home easier.

COVID has just been an entire I mean, kind of scary situation but also a situation that our staff and our foster parents that are volunteers and have had to learn to adapt to just be there for everybody.

That's that's the biggest thing, we've heard that together we'll get through this together.

We'll get through this and it's not just words together we did get through it.

- The mission of the organization first and foremost is to save lives.

To eliminate veterans' suicide.

It is to partner with rescue dogs for veterans as their service dogs.

To give them a way to learn, to get back out into society again.

The training process is six months long.

When we wrap our arms round not just our veteran but also around the family.

I have to say that it's been very difficult with COVID issues as everybody is dealing with at this point, always part of the testing was going up to another person in front shaking their hand and having dogs that are across from each other, sitting nicely.

We can't do that anymore.

So we've had to modify a lot of our training.

It takes people coming together with like hearts and like-minds to make a difference in someone else's life.

You can't ever go wrong by paying it forward whether they're into what we're doing and we can always use volunteers and help or into a food ministry or anything like that.

Just, give of yourself.

Let's not be so selfish.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm Linda Mignone.

Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Ultimate Medical Academy.

As a nonprofit education institution with the mission of equipping and empowering students to succeed in healthcare careers.

We work closely with healthcare employers to connect students directly to jobs here in Florida and across the nation.

In these unprecedented times, we are proud to sponsor the WEDU Be More Unstoppable Broadcast and celebrate achievements in education.

And in helping young people in our communities.

- School closures, childcare centers vacant and parents working from home affected hundreds of thousands of families in the Bay Area.

But through it, all these nonprofits continue to serve their clients in unique ways.

- Forgotten Angels is about helping kids that have aged out of foster care at risk or homeless.

And our mission is to help as many kids as possible.

And what we do is help them learn life skills.

We put them in a safe environment.

The biggest thing that we are trying to accomplish is to put these kids back out into the community and make themselves sufficient so they can take care of themselves.

So they don't end up in jail or homeless.

- There's certainly been some adjustments and some changes as a result of the COVID 19 and the pandemic.

But our focus is to remain vigilant, keep our kids safe but still at the same time, productive and engaged.

- All their life they've been trying to fit in.

Their parents didn't want them.

They ended up in foster care.

They get moved from home to home.

Here, they feel that sense of belonging because they know that we truly care.

- Forgotten Angels has something that's can be duplicated by other organizations that provides these kids with a different understanding of what their futures can become.

- Starting Right Now helps a niche population of youth that are coded as homeless, unaccompanied youth.

These kids are not living with their parents or guardian.

And they are not eligible for foster care because they were not taken out of their home but they rather chose to leave.

Due to unlikeable circumstances.

We offer a completely holistic program that not only gives them basic living skills but we give them academic support.

We help them preplan for the future and we give them life skill classes so that by the time they leave us, they are career ready.

When COVID hit us.

We had two full houses, which meant that we were actually having to adapt to help 90 students.

All of our kids had to be homeschooled.

So my office staff had to switch from going to the office to actually going into the homes and becoming their full time teachers.

Every single student graduated on time and went to their post-secondary goal on time.

So we really did not miss a beat.

We solved more mental health issues in that time period of quarantining because all of a sudden kids had a lot of time to just think about the trauma that had happened to them.

- We are here to inspire and empower students who qualify for need-based scholarships to become future community leaders.

And we have a very rigorous program in academics and a very significantly strong program in graduate support.

I think back on Friday, March 13.

Often and that was our last day of school on campus and before we took our spring break.

And at that time, I said to the students pack up your books, clean out your lockers.

We may not be back for awhile.

We had to work that week of spring break to make sure that our students were prepared.

We had to get every student who needed a device, a device.

We had to make sure that all of our families had access to wifi.

Within a week and a half we were up and running again in a virtual setting.

The adjustment was a bit bumpy, but it worked.

Our students are resilient.

They continue to work hard.

They love that they're back on campus and spending time together 'cause they've missed each other.

And our teachers just press forward with the kind of strength and power and professionalism that is really the stuff of dreams.

- Children First focus our mission is working with families with very young children who live below the federal poverty levels.

We start with a pregnant family and then we start providing care for six week old babies through the ages of four or five when they go to kindergarten.

what's less visible is the very intensive case management work that we do with our families with an ultimate goal of breaking that cycle of poverty.

March 13th is a date that sticks in a lot of people's minds.

That's the date when we decided we had to shift to virtual services.

A week later, we were working with parents through Zoom, FaceTime, phone calls helping them be their child's first teacher.

As an organization Children First pivoted on a dime.

However, June 1st with very intensive COVID-19 protocols in place we began bringing kids back to campus.

I would just tell you at a fundamental level.

That connection that love, that nurturing, that occurs between a teacher and the child in the classroom.

It's really irreplaceable.

(upbeat music) - Good evening, I'm Scott Gault.

Market President from the Bank of Tampa.

At the Bank of Tampa we strive to go above and beyond for our clients.

Whether they're large corporations or our neighbors in the community.

As the home Bank of Tampa, we believe all nonprofits who aid our community deserve recognition.

Community members, help community members.

That's why we are so proud to sponsor the WEDU Be More Unstoppable Broadcast and celebrate the significant work that nonprofits have done for our community.

- Serving the disabled, keeping the arts alive and online community support are just some of the challenges we faced in 2020.

And so for many of these organizations their services continued undeterred.

(upbeat music) - The Arc Tampa Bay takes care of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

We reach children as young as three up to our seniors who live in our group homes and attend our day program services.

They are able to go out and have their own adventures and thrive and continue learning and growing.

We're really proud of the fact that our services are full circle for an individual and their family member.

It was March 17th, St. Patrick's Day 2020 when our programs closed but for a place like The Arc we provide services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

And so while a lot of the world transitioned to working from home and closures we didn't have that choice.

We have relied so heavily on the caregivers who are so compassionate and cared deeply about this population that we serve.

To show up day after day.

And it really was remarkable to watch the journey that we have been on as an organization over the last 12 months.

- Lakeland Now is about getting people connected to their community through qualified, quality information and news.

The main thing we do is our own original journalism about local events in Lakeland.

Our focus is on efforts to make Lakeland a more livable community.

Well, our traffic exploded in March and April because of the hunger for information about COVID-19.

We continue updating a series of charts every day.

That show how the pandemic is affecting the community.

Our coverage now is shifted really more towards top looking at the availability of a vaccine vaccination for people over 65.

So people have found a spear valuable resource.

- New Tampa Players was founded in 2002 and we do community-based theater programming.

We'd usually do three or four large shows a year.

Plus the Penguin Project.

Penguin Project is a community theater program for children and young adults with special needs the chance and the opportunity to be the stars of the show.

And we were very blessed to finish Peter Pan literally a week before the quarantine happened.

So we were looking at home possibilities.

There's now ways that you can do a theater show over Zoom or you can film it and stream it.

And all of those types of things we've been very with having those ways of doing those.

But that doesn't really work for our Penguin Project kids.

So we completely reinvented it.

Well we call it Penguin Project at home and our young artists and our peer mentors they're working together to create their own original art.

They do tell us every time we have a Zoom meeting, "You know we really miss you."

And of course, everybody's like, "Yes, we miss you too."

But they've adapted really well.

And they've really enjoyed being able to create their own original art.

- At our essence of what United Way Suncoast does for our community is giving individuals and families the freedom to rise.

We bring together our community to invest in solving community issues and any barriers to help having our families achieve prosperity in their lives.

United Way Suncoast responded quickly to the needs of our community.

When we felt the initial effects and the sustaining effects from the pandemic.

We immediately opened a COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund.

We raised nearly $2 million in a matter of weeks and got those funds out to communities and organizations to support families throughout our region.

But we also saw that our first responders needed childcare support.

So we funded organizations to help our first responders with childcare because they still had to go to work.

This pandemic wasn't something that just happened in a flash during quarantine.

The impacts of this have been felt for months and will continue to be felt for months.

- The impact of COVID-19 has forced all of us to change how we go about everyday life.

And this pandemic has brought unparalleled demand for services from our nonprofit community.

But as we have witnessed, the human spirit is alive and well in West Central Florida, it's a community of resilience and dedication, and we encourage all of those out there serving our community to be more unstoppable for WEDU I'm Dalia colon.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for this community focused program was generously provided by Tampa General Hospital, Florida Blue, Neilson, The Bank of Tampa, Ultimate Medical Academy, The Bernard F. and Mary Ann Powell Foundation, the duPont Registry, Warren Averett, and the Tampa Bay Times.