“I cannot financially support you. I can’t save your home. But I can make sure you get food,” said Keena Key.
FORT WORTH, Texas — Bookshelves are positioned near the curb of a front yard in the Wedgwood neighborhood of Fort Worth. And although they were once mistaken for donations to a bulk trash pickup day, they are actually a carefully arranged lifeline for anyone who might need a helping hand.
The shelves, stocked with canned goods, clothing and more, are the work of Keena Key.
“They absolutely think I’m crazy,” she said, laughing at some of the reactions she’s received.
She advertised her free front yard food pantry on social media. She invites anyone who needs help to take what they need and asks others to consider donating to the effort.
“I think it’s good. I think it’s very helpful,” a single mom named Jennifer said when she visited the pantry on Wicks Trail for the second time. “I’ve been battling for four years a custody battle. When you have no help, it’s really hard.”
But Keena Key is offering a lot more. Every week, she spends several hours cooking and delivering meals for the homeless, elderly, and shut-ins in her neighborhood.
“All the stories are quite unique. And I don’t know any other word but heartbreaking,” she said.
And she does all this for her own very good reasons.
“I remember looking through those trash cans for food when I lived under those bridges,” she said.
Keena was once among Fort Worth’s homeless. Orphaned, she was a foster child and says she and her siblings moved more than 500 times. She emancipated herself at the age of 16, gained custody of her two younger sisters, and fought to keep her family together.
Now, as a professional social worker, she says she sees the misery and poverty in her neighborhood as ingredients so many people seemed to share.
“It’s hard because there are people I watch in my neighborhood, and there’s nothing I can do. Like, I cannot financially support you. I can’t save your home. But I can make sure you get food.”
So, several days a week, she and her partner Sirena King load their truck with homemade food to deliver to people who have reached out to her on NextDoor and other social media. An elderly woman named Francis now welcomes them as friends.
“It’s fantastic,” Francis said. “I think it’s wonderful to have someone like this do this for us.”
“It makes me really happy to meet these people and hear their stories and be able to give them a hope and a way out,” Keena said. “And even if that just takes a meal or food and some clothes to get their day started in a different way, it does actually make me happy. Stressed out but happy,” she said with a laugh.
By her own estimates, Keena believes she’s helped hundreds of families so far with her food deliveries and her free front-yard food pantry.
“I would hope that if I was back on that other side, that somebody would do it for me,” she said.
As for the food pantry in her front yard, stocked from her own pocket and from donations, Keena says there have been some complaints. There was at least one threat to have Fort Worth sanitation haul it away. But she says people in need keep coming.
“Obviously, they’re not on my doorstep for no reason,” she said. “It makes me happy, honestly, to show people that there’s a way out from that kind of life. Because by all statistics, I should have fallen through the hole like everyone else.”
“The more people that we can help, the better,” Sirena King said. “If we can take one less burden off of them, we will.”
“I grew up in a world where you didn’t hear someone say that they were proud of you,” Keena said. “And I actually get that a lot these days.”
And she says that’s all the payment she needs, as long as she and that pantry still stand.
