By Susan Gallagher

For Jim and Joanne Cortese, knowing the Butte Emergency Food Bank is strong makes it easier to step down this month as its directors and prepare for their move to central Washington, where they have family.

In the eight years since the Corteses began managing the food bank, it has moved into a facility several times the size of the old one and much better equipped. Food donations have risen considerably. Dedicated volunteers, many of them retirees, keep the place humming. The Corteses project that for 2010, more than $1 million worth of food, a record, will have been given to people in need.

As she and her husband prepare to leave the director positions at month’s end, Joanne said, they have a sense of “gratitude to the community. Maybe we’ve been the directors, but it would not have happened without the kind of support we get.” That support includes Aid to the Needy grants from the Diocese of Helena, grants that Joanne said have been given “for as long as we’ve been here and longer.”

Butte honored the Corteses at a Civic Center dinner on Dec. 4, also the day of a major food drive that takes place annually, drawing hundreds of volunteers. “Jim and I think we’ve been involved in about 15 of the December drives over the years,” Joanne said. “When our children were young, it was a good chance for them to be involved in volunteer service.” Before the Corteses became directors of the food bank, they served on its board.

Their pastor, Father Tom Haffey at Butte’s St. Ann Parish, said the Corteses have been “real champions” in providing food assistance. “They have been most generous and unselfish in their work,” he said.

Around the time that Joanne retired in 2001 from Montana Tech, where she was on the faculty, and Jim retired in 1999 from a sales position with electrical equipment supplier Wesco Distribution Inc., the Corteses were considering how best to be of service with their new free time.

“We were thinking of something a little less demanding” than the food bank, “but you know how the Lord works—it was like, `I think this is what we’re supposed to do,’” Joanne said.

Working at the food bank Monday through Friday, Jim said he “derived a lot of satisfaction from coming here every day. We have wonderful volunteers, good people. They laugh and they joke and they do their work.”

The Corteses accept no money for their work. Joanne said they feel blessed that retirement resources are sufficient for them to waive payment.

This spring they plan to move to Ellensburg, Wash., home of their son and his family. The Corteses’ also have a daughter, who lives in Bismarck, N.D., with her family. In each state, there are two grandchildren. Joanne said “being available to grandkids” will be the focus of the next chapter in her life and her husband’s life.

The new director of the Butte Emergency Food Bank is Kathy Griffith, who began working in September.

“It’s a good match,” Joanne said. “It feels right. She knows what she’s about, and she’s good with the volunteers.”


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 26, No. 12, December 17, 2010.