Meet the Compassionate Founder of the Shame Free Collective!
This is a truly heartwarming story of turning difficult childhood memories into a mission to help others.
As TODAY reports, bubbly West Michigan mom of five, Alyssa Curtis, knows firsthand what it feels like to rely on food pantries. As a child she visited them regularly with her family, but was often made to feel embarrassed and judged, rather than supported. These experiences stayed with her, and ultimately inspired her to create a unique resource for families facing food insecurity.
Curtis has directed her compassion for families facing food insecurity into the creation of a nonprofit with a growing network of pantries, offering much-needed food and non-food essentials to people in need. Through her Shame Free Collective initiative, Curtis supports locals in need. She documents her work on social media, where her posts inspire people to donate goods and host pantries, getting involved in their own neighborhoods.
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The Shame Free Collective is Born
Food Insecurity remains a serious issue in the US. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, 13.7 percent of American households experienced food insecurity in 2024.
Curtis is candid about needing to visit food pantries weekly as a child, and remembers feeling humiliated and frustrated by the lack of dignity and inferior food quality of some of the food available.
Years later, those memories helped shape her vision for the Shame Free Collective. Curtis’s own experiences with food pantries became the blueprint for her approach, helping people access what they need without shame or judgement, as the Daily Good underlines.
Today, this nonprofit operates pantries filled with quality food, hygiene and baby care goods in West Michigan, to discreetly help those who need help.
Curtis didn’t always work to relieve food insecurity. She shares with TODAY that the idea for the Shame Free Collective came to her when she was monetizing cooking content on social media. She is open about how she wasn’t at ease with doing this. As she says, this “didn’t sit right with my spirit when there was so much struggle [due to food insecurity] around us.”
It all started with her creating a video of her setting up her very first pantry with the help of her carpenter husband, as the website of St. Luke’s details. With some lumber and a trip to the grocery store, the couple built and filled the first pantry.
Then something unexpected happened.
Neighbors started offering help, and asking how they could get a pantry in their area.
Soon, she was capturing her pantry restocks on camera, and was buoyed by the positive feedback messages from her followers: “I just got so many messages of, ‘How can I start this?’ and ‘How did you get started?’ Curtis tells Today, that she decided to start building more pantries to serve families throughout the area.
Take What You Need, Leave What You Can
Today, the Shame Free Collective works on a simple principle, as FOX17 details: “The idea is, take what you need, leave what you can, so it’s neighbors helping neighbors,” says Curtis, adding that this creates a “beautiful community hub.”
As Today documents, Curtis’s car is packed with assorted items as she restocks the shelves of her network of pantries, helped by her kids. She relies on the donations in kind that arrive from strangers who are moved to help by her videos.
Curtis is passionate about community building, and in her conviction that nobody deserves to go home to empty cupboards, and that no parents should have to skip dinner so that their kids get to eat.
Her response to local food insecurity is expressed in the easy-access pantries that help remove the shame and other barriers to accessing much-needed food. Fox17 emphasizes that these pantries are often located in people’s front yards. This is because, as Curtis stresses, the interest from locals has been overwhelming: “So many people want to be a part of the solution, and so by building a little pantry for their front yard, they all of a sudden were able to be a part.”
Curtis typically restocks her pantries once a week, but has on-the-ground help: “Each pantry has a host who helps keep it running. If we have extra food or hygiene items, I restock the pantries where the need is greatest or where a host has asked for a little extra support,” Curtis tells Today.
And the network has grown rapidly — from just one pantry last fall, to 23 today.
Curtis handles much of the marketing, marketing and administrative work herself. Her social media presence has become an important part of the operation. This is because it connects the nonprofit with people who want to donate food, hygiene products, baby supplies and other essentials. Fox 17 notes that friends, neighbors, followers, and even delivery drivers arrive with packages almost daily.
Curtis works on her mission with a thoughtful, human-centered approach. She appreciates, for instance, that microwave-ready meals can offer instant protein and a feeling of being comfortably full to the unhoused, often people living in their cars, who can then take these meals to gas stations to be heated.
For this kindhearted mom, the mission is deeply personal, but the response from her community has transformed it into something much bigger, proving that compassion can be contagious.
