Sarasota ladies show love to homeless

Lashunda Thomas’s call to service to help Sarasota’s homeless started in 2012, when she began making sandwiches in her kitchen and passing them out at the Salvation Army. Over the next two years, her passion grew, as did her reputation in the community as someone who cared.

She knew she was on the right path when she answered a knock at the front door of her home and found a woman there asking for help.

“I heard the Lord say, ‘Get a purse and pack it with everything you can,’” Thomas said of that encounter in 2014. “When I gave it to her, she fell into my arms crying. Two weeks later, she came back to tell me that she was doing great, and had moved back home.”

Ladies of Grace Bags Outreach was born at that doorstep moment.

Thomas, 40, scoured her closet and that of her daughter for more handbags suitable for donation after filling with life’s basics.

 When her home supply ran out, she started visiting yard sales with the hope of buying all the second-hand purses she could find, working largely on her own to find what she could and accepting donations whenever they presented themselves.

“I just remember the one day, sitting at my kitchen table and saying, ‘Lord, multiply homeless this outreach,’” she said. “When I prayed that prayer, within two weeks, we had so much coming our way and my daughter, Alicia Walls, complained she didn’t have a room anymore because the donations had completely overtaken her room and my house.”

In the years following, Ladies of Grace Bags Outreach grew into a volunteer group of 17 people. The volunteers have become dedicated to Thomas’s cause, like Christine Briandi and Barbara Shulla, who Thomas met through volunteering together.

Every Thursday, the group works together to organize the donations at a storage unit. 

The volunteers fill the purses for women and plastic bags for men with toiletries and other necessities of life.

A month’s worth of preparation and donations lead up to a monthly distribution on Saturdays, she said.

“We set up like a store, and (the homeless) can come to pick out whatever they need. We have a tent for lunch and we have a tent for businesses hiring and others ... we try to be a resource for them. Our job is not to criticize.”

The Ladies of Grace Bags Outreach is also starting a new ministry, inviting the public every fourth Saturday of the month under the pavilion in Gillespie Park to worship with Thomas and her family.

Thomas says she and her husband have a faithful relationship with God and are ordained ministers. 

She said they want to be more of a service to the community than simple providers of basic products and something in which to carry them.

“We want to touch more hearts than bags. We want to see the ministry grow,” Thomas said.