FFTP Honors Patty Mahfood With the Founders Cornerstone Award

COCONUT CREEK, Fla. (Feb. 14, 2024) – Food For The Poor (FFTP) commemorated its 42nd anniversary Monday with a special tribute to Patty Mahfood, the wife of the charity’s late founder, Ferdinand “Ferdy” Mahfood.

Patty Mahfood was presented with the Founders Cornerstone Award, acknowledging the legacy of Ferdy Mahfood and the pivotal role she played alongside her husband in continuing and expanding the organization. The award was established in 2021 and is presented every year on the charity’s anniversary.

FFTP President/CEO Ed Raine expressed his deep admiration for Patty Mahfood and the impact she has had on the organization. He also acknowledged Ferdy and Patty on the first Founders Day after Ferdy’s passing and how FFTP got to where it is today because of them.

“Patty’s love, compassion and support have been instrumental in furthering the mission of Food For The Poor,” Raine said. “I want to thank you for the support you gave Ferdy. I know that without your support and the support of his family, Ferdy would not have accomplished what he did.”

Patty shared how her husband’s spiritual conversion transformed her life and the lives of everyone in their family.

“As we saw him grow in it, we saw the wisdom of it all and the spirituality of it all,” Patty said. “His remarkable change in the direction in which you’re looking for happiness really moved me greatly in my life. It was very difficult but very enlightening to me as a person. I think I discovered areas of kindness and compassion that may never have shown themselves to me had I not been in all those countries, slums and hospitals, and orphanages. It really changed my view.”

Monday’s program at the charity’s Coconut Creek headquarters was filled with tributes, songs and moving images of FFTP’s last 42 years. Guests watched a video in which Ferdy and Patty’s three children, Gerald, Marianne, and Margaret, shared special memories of their parents.

“He was committed. He was spiritual,” Gerald said of his father. “I asked him once, ‘How do you keep doing this?’ He said, ‘When I look into the face of a person in the ghetto, I see God.’ It was such a profound statement. That really stuck in my head for many, many years.”

“It was harder on my mom than the three of us,” Marianne said. “She had to change her whole life for him and to support him. She went on almost every trip with him. It made her a better person and the three of us also. We were never the same. My mom has been a big inspiration to the three of us.”

Whether it was taking care of her husband when he began suffering from Parkinson’s disease or supporting FFTP through the years, Margaret said her mother was steadfast in her care and support.

“We’re not just talking about trips to offices,” Margaret said. “It was trips to the slums, to leprosy homes, mental hospitals, prisons, garbage dumps, to reach desperate people crying out for help,” she explained.

“She was right there with him, supporting him and loving him and walking through the slum with him and giving feedback and interviews,” Margaret added. “It wasn’t something she signed up for. But she was behind him 110 percent always.”

With the love and support of his family, Ferdy Mahfood established FFTP in Florida on February 12, 1982. The organization initially sent resources to his homeland of Jamaica, where he witnessed firsthand the plight of people suffering from poverty, disease, and the impact of natural disasters.

As the charity expanded, Ferdy and Patty traveled throughout the Caribbean, bringing resources to countless people in need. FFTP officially launched its operation in Jamaica in June 1983 and created a model that the organization would later replicate in other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America.

In a video played during Monday’s program, Fr. Richard Ho Lung, founder of the Missionaries of the Poor and the current Father General, shared how he took Ferdy to Eventide Home in Jamaica, where he saw poverty up close. Ferdy was so moved by the experience that he was inspired to start Food For The Poor.

The CRUSE Tones, a band of FFTP team members, performed a song by Fr. Ho Lung titled “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.”

Since 1982, FFTP, through its dedicated donors, has built more than 95,000 homes, sent more than 101,000 containers filled with essential goods to countries where it helps, and delivered more than $18.2 billion in aid.

“It’s very important for us as an organization to remind ourselves of our roots, to stop for a moment and to recognize the Founders,” Raine said to Patty. “I hope that everything we do will make you and Ferdy proud of this legacy that we so importantly steward in your name.”

Food For The Poor, one of the largest international relief and development organizations in the nation, does much more than feed millions of hungry children and families living in poverty primarily in 17 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. This interdenominational Christian ministry provides emergency relief assistance, water, medicine, educational materials, homes, support for vulnerable children, care for the aged, skills training and micro-enterprise development assistance. For more information, please visit foodforthepoor.org.

Michael Turnbell

Communications
954-471-0928
[email protected]