Volunteering at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, Joni Pierce provides service with a smile

Show Caption

• Joni Pierce has dedicated her life to serving her community, volunteering at food banks and teaching.
• Pierce views volunteering as a responsibility rather than a special occasion, consistently serving those in need.

From the classroom to the shopping carts, giving back has become part of Joni Pierce’s life since she was a young girl growing up in the Dayton area.

What started as a passion for service that was discovered on a church mission trip in high school became a lifelong journey. Pierce went on to become a math teacher and an intervention specialist at Christian schools while her husband, Mark, moved their family around as a Presbyterian pastor.

While both raising a family and working as a teacher, Pierce’s service to the community did not stop.

After moving back to Dayton from Buffalo, New York, the Pierce family landed in Grove City as Mark took a job as a chaplain with Hospice of Central Ohio based in Newark, and Joni began teaching at Emmanuel Christian Academy in Springfield.

To get involved with her local community in Grove City, in 2008, she began volunteering at the Mid-Ohio Food Collective, back when it was known as the Mid-Ohio Food Bank.

“One night, I went there and they asked me if I was there for volunteer training for the food pantry, and I said, ‘Well should I be?’” Pierce recounted.

“I thought, ‘Maybe that’s something I should look into,’ and so I did. The rest is history.”

Pierce has held roles within the collective’s food pantry, ranging from bagging produce to working the checkout line. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she said she was known as the “cart lady” because she would wheel full carts of food out to cars throughout the socially distanced area.

“I can’t tell you how many people, when I used to register people, would almost cry because they were so embarrassed. They would say, ‘You know, I’m hoping I only have to do this a couple of months,’” Pierce said.

“I would look at them and I would say, ‘Well that’s why we’re here, and we’re here for as long as you need us to be here.’”

Now retired from teaching, Pierce is able to make it out to the pantry several times a week. Even through her years as a teacher, she said, she would set aside time weekly on a weekday evening and a Saturday morning.

Service as a lifestyle, not a special occasion

Beyond the longevity of her volunteer service, Pierce’s view of the volunteer position sets her apart from others, according to the food collective’s market manager, Rebecca Peacock-Creagh.

To Pierce, volunteering at the pantry is not just something to do once or twice a year or during times where people may view the need as greater, like the holiday season.

Since it opened in 2023 in a building that previously was an Aldi, Pierce has volunteered at the food collective’s Mid-Ohio Market at Gantz Road in Grove City. She goes above and beyond to keep the space put together for the customers to walk through.

“She doesn’t consider what she does is volunteer work, but it’s her responsibility to the community. It’s a whole different vision. It’s not like, ‘Oh, look what I’m doing, but I have these responsibilities in my life. This is one of them, and here’s where I work it in.’ You just don’t meet lots of people like that,” Peacock-Creagh said.

“She understands that people are hungry 24/7.”

Peacock-Creagh put out a call for more volunteers to join Pierce at the food collective, highlighting the Gantz Road market, where she is Pierce’s supervisor. Interested individuals or groups can go to mofc.org/volunteer and create an account to get involved.

“Something that people don’t understand is people will say, ‘When I have time, I’ll volunteer,’ or ‘When I retire, I’ll volunteer,’ but Joni is one of those people that even when she was working full-time and still had all her family responsibilities and all these other things that she does, she made time,” Peacock-Creagh said.

“If other people did what Joni did, there wouldn’t be hungry people.”

This article was made possible by support from the Center for HumanKindness at The Columbus Foundation, which has partnered with The Columbus Dispatch to profile those making our community a better place. Help us inspire kindness by suggesting people, initiatives, or organizations for Reporter Sophia Veneziano to profile. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more at Dispatch.com/Kindness. The Dispatch retains full editorial independence for all content.