Newark –A small brick house sits on Newark’s South 17th Street nestled between a green residence and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. That worn two-story house, guarded by a chain-link fence, is where Maria Torres finds her sanctuary.

On February 13, 2020, Torres was promoted to run United Community Corporation’s Champion House food pantry out of that brick building. Within a month of that promotion, the coronavirus began its deadly and rampant spread across the City of Newark, Essex County, New Jersey and beyond. In the blink of an eye, unemployment rates and COVID-19 cases sky-rocketed making Torres’ service one of the most important to the people of Newark and Essex County.

Torres was nervous about the virus and rightfully so. She was diagnosed with Lupus just before the pandemic hit making her extremely high-risk. That autoimmune disease, however, wasn’t going to stop her from helping those in need.

After conversations in March with a local food bank, UCC’s executive director Craig Mainor and her staff, Torres passionately decided to keep Champion House open and its doors haven’t closed since.

Since the pandemic hit, that tiny house around the corner from the hustle and bustle on Clinton Avenue has been responsible with providing food to over 150-thousand individuals with the help of donations from Community Food Bank and MEND Hunger Relief Network.

“I kept thinking what if my mother or myself was in the situation where we didn’t have any food? We’d want an agency like UCC to be there to help us,” Torres said. “I can’t believe what we are able to do out of this tiny house. I think this house has some magic or something in it because we’ve been able to provide so many people with food. After all that we’ve accomplished here, I almost wish I could live in this house.”

The Champion House food pantry has seen an increase of 1,084-percent in clients served from 2019 to 2020 after serving 14,400 last year. Torres and her staff are relentless to provide food to the community and do it in a variety of different ways. They host daily distributions at Champion House, are a featured participant in mass distribution events, distribute through UCC’s 40-plus partners and personally deliver food to those that can’t leave their homes.

United Community Corporation operates the only food pantry in Newark to deliver 14 days’ worth of food to families forced to quarantine due to COVID-19 exposure and/or contraction. This service, which uses contactless delivery, has been used by Newark’s Department of Health, the Newark Public School District and Bridgeway Rehabilitation Services.

“As soon as the coronavirus hit, we started to do the COVID family deliveries and began creating partnerships with local churches and organizations,” Torres said. “I always tell my staff that Maria cannot run this by herself. My staff works so hard to provide for our community. This is a team and this is a family.”

That family is a huge point of motivation for Torres.

It took her two years to receive her Lupus diagnosis and despite having an autoimmune disease in the middle of a pandemic, she continued to push herself not only to meet the hard work of her staff but also to provide food to clients in desperate need.

“I’m not letting my condition stop me from working with my amazing staff and helping people,” she said. “When I found out I had Lupus, I said, ‘This is not going to cripple me. This is going to make me stronger.’ I know that people need us right now so that’s my motivation to keep going.”

Torres has been part of United Community Corporation since 2013. She began working at the agency’s Fulton Street Emergency Shelter as a volunteer and was hired later that year. She got her first taste of running a food pantry at the shelter before working her way up through different departments and was promoted to run the Champion House food pantry in February.

The success of Champion House prompted United Community Corporation to open a second food pantry on Ann Street in Newark’s East Ward, which is set to open in March.

Although UCC’s food pantry efforts will have a second location, Torres wants to make sure her clients know that when the chainlink gates are open at that tiny brick house on South 17th Street, they can come right in because she has plenty of food to give to them.

“Anybody that comes here, we try to help,” she said. “We try to treat the clients like family so that when they walk away they feel like they got something other than just food out of their visit. That is UCC’s goal. We can’t let clients leave depressed, we stop, speak with them and try to get to know them. They become part of our family.”