By Mohammad Rafiq
On most mornings at Long Island Cares’ busiest pantry, the Nassau Center for Collaborative Assistance, on Sunrise Highway in Freeport, Program Coordinator Reyna Felix arrives before the facility opens and starts doing the invisible work that makes the visible work possible.
“I got 45 minutes to get ready, read my emails, make some phone calls, make sure if I’m getting a delivery that day,” Felix, 35, said, describing the rhythm of a typical shift.
Once the pantry’s doors open at 9 a.m., it’s a sprint that continues until 2:30 in the afternoon — after which Felix and her staff begin preparing for the next day.
The lobby fills day after day, and Felix oversees a fast-paced, retail-style operation — deliveries, volunteer coverage, database tracking and the everyday emergencies that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s schedule.
“It’s like a like a retail store, I would say,” she said. “You want to give the best. Everything you have in stock, you want to make sure the client is able to see it.”
That mix of logistics and humanity is why colleagues, volunteers and clients have come to see Felix as the personification of the Freeport pantry’s steady pulse, whose impact is measured not in speeches or spotlights but in full grocery bags carried out the door with dignity intact.
For all she does for Long Island Cares, the Herald is proud to name Felix its 2025 Person of the Year.
Her association with the organization didn’t begin with a job title. It began with need. Felix grew up in the Dominican Republic, and first came to the United States, and Freeport, with her family at age 14. She later returned to the D.R. to finish secondary school, and to earn a college degree in international business, before coming back to New York.
Before she went to work for the pantry, she was — like the many she serves day in and day out — a client. She had worked as both a server and a manager in restaurants, as a bartender, and as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, but the pandemic years upended everything: Jobs disappeared, hours shrank and family budgets snapped under the strain.
Felix was raising three children at the time — including a newborn — while trying to hold on to unstable work. “It was a rough time,” she recounted. “It was a point of life that me and my husband were struggling because I had no job, and he was only doing part-time.”
She came to the pantry for food — first with her mother, then for herself — and found something else, too: a staff that understood what families were up against.
A place that give you diapers, milk, formula, some help for your pantry,” Felix said, recalling her elation. “Oh my God, it’s awesome. So I was very happy as a client.”
Then, one day in early 2022, she spotted a sign saying that the facility was hiring. She applied from the parking lot, sending her résumé on her phone while waiting to shop. Two days later, she got a call. Two weeks after that, she resigned from her job at USPS.
“I said, ‘Listen, I’m not gonna say I was looking for this, but I think that this is part of me,’” she recalls telling her previous manager when questioned about leaving a secure government job. “I know how good they’ve been for me, so I think I can do the same thing for others.”
Long Island Cares' leadership describes a similar arc — a client who became staff, then quickly became a central member of its team. “She was a client. Got herself in the predicament of needing a pantry, came and saw the opportunity of a job with us,” Idalia Boczek, the director who oversees satellite locations, said. “And so we were like, how perfect to help a client who is in need.”
So Felix joined the operation — and before long, she became a driving force inside it.
The work is constant — and personal
Ask Felix what success looks like at the end of a long day, and she doesn’t talk about metrics first. She talks about what the numbers mean when they become dinners. “It makes me feel good that 125 families put food on the table — and not a little food,” she said. “They (get) a lot of food, good-quality food, and they feel good at the same time.”
And then there’s the part that doesn’t show up on any daily tally sheet: the way people are treated when they walk in.
“Something that I really care (about) is how the clients be treated here, always with a smile,” Felix said. “I always welcome (clients) with a nice smile, with what they need.”
That approach is what stands out to the people around her. “She sees people when she talks to them,” Peter Crescenti, Long Island Cares’ media relations specialist, said. “She doesn’t say, oh, here’s another person that needs food. She sees a human being. And she relates to them in a way that they walk out of there with their dignity intact.”
Franklin Karp, a volunteer and a retired chief operating officer of a home technology company, who has spent nearly two years helping out at the Freeport pantry, said he saw a noticeable shift when Felix took the lead. “Reyna’s energy and enthusiasm is infectious,” Karp said, “and she really makes the place home.”
Karp described Felix as someone with a rare operational instinct — the kind of person who anticipates problems before they surface. “She’s driven to help people, and she does,” he said. “She helps the clients. She’s great at directing the volunteers. It’s just — it’s very impressive. She could be an executive at a company without any problems.
“Actually,” Karp added, “I would hire her as a vice president in my company any time.”
‘Made me feel special’
For Guillermo Vega, a resident of Hempstead and a Vietnam veteran, Felix is the reason he kept coming back to the Freeport pantry.
“I was kind of short on food,” Vega said. “And they told me about her, and I went over there and she treated me very well.”
He emphasized that what mattered wasn’t only what went into the bag he took home, but what happened at the pantry itself. “She’s a beautiful lady,” Vega said. “She cares about everyone. Don’t matter who the person is. She really cares about all of us.”
He said he had tried another pantry, but left. “They were not that nice,” he said.
And when Felix offered care — treating a person like a person, as Vega described it — that hit home. “Oh, my God, (it) made me feel special,” he said. “I love that lady.”
Felix said she often hears people’s stories even when she isn’t asking for them — about job losses, pregnancies, moves, crises, needs. She listens, and she tries to connect them to something beyond food when she can.
As far as Felix is concerned, indifference is not an option. “Things like that are things that you do because you care,” she said. “I cannot wash my hands and say, like, ‘Oh, I don’t care.’ … No, no, no, that’s not me.”
