PEABODY — Gina Goodwin has lived in West Peabody her entire life and has been a registered nurse working in home care for 25 years.
In addition to her job in health care, where she helps people throughout the North Shore with managing their medications, Goodwin comes to people’s aid in other ways.
About six years ago, Goodwin was at work around Thanksgiving and realized that a lot of her patients had nowhere to go for the holiday, or didn’t have the funds to buy and prepare a Thanksgiving meal.
This inspired her to start Gina’s Giving Back, where she and volunteers provide Thanksgiving meals, Christmas toys, and assistance year round to those in need.
In its first year, Gina’s Giving Back provided around 500 Thanksgiving meals to people in need in the North Shore, thanks to donations which were brought in by word of mouth.
For these contributions to her community, Goodwin has been named Essex Media Group’s “Person of the Year” for Peabody.
This past Thanksgiving, Gina’s Giving Back provided more than 4,400 meals — some precooked, to-go meals and others containing the ingredients to cook the meal at home.
“We’re open all year round for people that have food, toys or clothing insecurities,” Goodwin said. “We do any type of help that we can provide through community donations.”
Goodwin has a fundraising page that she publicizes during the holiday season, and local organizations, schools and businesses host food drives to support her initiative.
Goodwin posts about the food donations on local community pages, to find people in need to give the food to.
“If people can cook themselves, and they just don’t have the financial means for it, we do a meal box that comes with a gift card to get a turkey or a ham and then all of the fixings,” Goodwin said. “For the people who can’t cook, then I cook the meal.”
Goodwin cooks all of the meals on her own in her kitchen, since she doesn’t allow other people into her home because of COVID-19.
For the Christmas-toy donations, Goodwin collects funds to purchase toys and also collects toys from local toy drives.
This year, Goodwin teamed up with a Boston organization for the toy drive, and donated more than 10,000 toys combined to kids for Christmas.
“It was insane,” Goodwin said.
Between raising the funds for the meals and toys, preparing everything and delivering it all, Goodwin said she has around 100 volunteers during the holiday season.
Goodwin and her husband have six kids ranging from 5 to 15 years old, all of whom help out.
Goodwin’s husband is usually a large factor in helping with Gina’s Giving Back, but was unable to pitch in this year because he is battling throat cancer and has a feeding tube.
While he is undergoing chemotherapy at Mass General, Goodwin said she continued Gina’s Giving Back because “life doesn’t stop for her problems.”
“People still need meals and help,” Goodwin said. “This was a really tough year for us too, financially.”
In the past, Goodwin matched most donations that were given to her for the meals, but couldn’t this year because her husband hasn’t worked since he got sick in June, and she is working part time to help care for him and her kids.
“Even though we’re going through our own thing right now, other people are going through things too,” Goodwin said.
In addition to running Gina’s Giving Back during the holiday season, Goodwin also helps people throughout the year who are transitioning from a shelter into housing by gathering donations for them.
“It’s primarily around the holidays but I never close,” Goodwin said. “I’ll throw up a post on my page if someone is looking for furniture or when we’re trying to help a lot of the homeless.”
Since starting this six years ago, Goodwin said everybody usually wants to help, which has been a huge factor in making Gina’s Giving Back so successful.
“My original goal was just maybe helping a few people or a few families that were in need,” Goodwin said. “My goal has changed to now try to help everybody that’s in need.”
