18/06/2020
Familiar Faces: Holly Hight gives back to community
BY JILL ZIMA BORSKI Key West CitizenJune 2, 2020
📷Photo provided by Jeff Cale
With a goal of providing meals to promote the immune system, the intrepid Island Equity Real Estate delivery team included, from left, Karen Prince, Ana Zalesky, Jeffrey Shamon, Holly Hight, Debbie Self with Ruffie, and Sunne Rego.Holly Hight and the Island Equity Real Estate team were motivated to help the Upper Keys community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The realty’s founder and broker brainstormed with her team and determined that healthy food with anti-inflammatory properties was the best way to share a hug with those in need.Reaching out to Angie Kemmer, a social worker for Baptist Hospital, and Kate Banick, with The Good Health Clinic, the trio quietly gathered names and offered assistance to those in financial need, living alone or with a compromised immune system who would welcome a healthy meal delivered each Friday.Hight said Island Equity has always been engaged in giving back to the community. When the COVID-19 shutdown happened Realtors were not showing homes, and social isolation and financial challenges Keyswide were mounting.The team looked specifically at the disease and how the lungs fill with fluid and become inflamed. “It seemed to be a good time to take in food that resisted inflammation,” Hight said. Then, Hight thought it would be good to engage the farmers in Homestead whose produce was rotting in the fields because restaurants were no longer ordering food deliveries. Pieces of Island Equity’s plan fell into place.Fresh food from the farms of Michel Borek and Sam Accursio was delivered by Teena Borek of Teena’s Pride, who retired from farming and wanted to join in the Keys community effort of feeding those “in need of a hug with healthy food.”Hight called Cheryl Martin, who fulfills the realty’s catering needs for open houses, and asked if she was available to prepare vegetarian meals with a healthful purpose. Hight said in the past, Martin’s health-oriented tinctures and medicinal teas were sought after throughout the community. She knew she was “unusually well-qualified” to create meals to promote the immune system.Martin owns the catering business, Graze Love, and works in the kitchen at Trading Post. She utilized Trading Post’s state-certified kitchen to create the meals and Trading Post staff helped out. “Food is the most delicious when it is simple and fresh,” said Martin. “We were thrilled when we were called upon to help the community.”Then, in another generous move, Martin provides the menus for each meal in the delivery bags, so recipients could duplicate them if they chose.Hight’s Realtors stepped up to deliver 70 meals each week. “It took courage on Trading Post’s part to take delivery of the produce, cook the meals for us and then allow us to enter the shop each week to pick up the meals. We are grateful to them.” Each team member voluntarily delivered 10-12 meals each week between Mile Markers 74 and 106.“It a beautiful and heart-warming,” said Hight of the encounters with the homebound, the needy and the elderly, some of whom lived alone. “Talking through screen doors was like socially-distant hugs.”Once upon a time, Hight was a waitress at the Lorelei when she moved to the Keys in 1999. She recalled a move with “just the clothes in my car.” That was all she owned. She learned there are opportunities to make money and times to give back, and this is the latter, she said.“We wanted to give back to the community that’s done a lot for us.”
