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The longtime leader, who plans to retire from the Santa Barbara organization in December, uses his own grief and loss to guide him in helping those in need

Among the colorful murals, the whimsical design, and crowded hallways bustling with teenage volunteers and customers who fill the Unity Shoppe, Executive Director Tom Reed — a tall man with a white beard and wearing a button-up shirt — looks almost out of place among the chaos.

However, when he talks about the Unity Shoppe, it becomes clear the amount of joy and pride he has in the work he’s done during the past 20 years.

Looking like something between a McDonald’s PlayPlace and Santa’s workshop, Santa Barbara's Unity Shoppe is not a shop at all. It’s a food bank that also provides clothes, toiletries, toys and opportunities for those in need.

Unity Shoppe helps on average 18,000 people a year and donates $2 million in food and merchandise a year with the help of about 1,700 volunteers. It's a grocery store, where patrons use a shopping cart to go through aisles of canned food, dried goods, produce, meat and dairy. When they check out, the barcodes are scanned to keep track of inventory, but no one pays for their purchases.

Some products are donated. Some are purchased with the money that comes from the Unity Gift Shoppe on State Street. All of the items must be barcoded and accounted for. According to Reed, volunteers will barcode 750,000 food items a year, not including clothing and toiletries.

The barcodes track the fair market value of every donated and purchased item to obtain an audit. That is just one example of the work volunteers do at Unity Shoppe to provide for the community.

For the last 20 years, Reed has put his heart and soul into Unity Shoppe and will be retiring in December.

Unity Shoppe’s newest program, Unity Shoppe Delivers, was started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Seniors who were trying to keep their social distance were no longer coming in, and the organization was given a refrigerated van to make deliveries.

The program was such a success that it is now a permanent part of the program so that Unity Shoppe can reach disabled folks and others with complicated transportation issues.

Reed said he hopes to expand the program in collaboration with other nonprofit organizations in the North County.

“It's a safety net that keeps families from falling deep into welfare or even going homeless,” Reed said. “So, we feel very grateful to prevent those two things from happening and get people contributing back to society where they want to be and where we need them to be.”

Reed’s passion for helping those in need comes from his own history of grief and loss. After losing two homes and a friend, Reed dedicated his career to helping others.

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Reed moved to Michigan as an infant and grew up playing hockey. After graduating from Michigan State University, he joined officer training school and became an officer in the Air Force. Throughout his five years in the Air Force, Reed did 25 tours and traveled all over the world.

After retiring from the military, Reed moved to San Francisco to work in real estate development with a friend from the Army. They were working on the plans for a federal dam that, because of political reasons, never got built. Later, Reed lost his house in a fire.

“It was everything I had collected by traveling around the world in the Air Force, so that was a shock,” Reed said. “I'd never lost anything up until that point.”

With nothing keeping him in California, Reed moved to Northern Nevada to embark on a new business venture. He purchased 5 acres of land between Reno and Carson City and started building a home for himself.

As fate would have it, a year after he moved onto the property, an avalanche-induced mudslide destroyed his house and killed one of his close friends.

“I felt really responsible,” Reed said. “He was volunteering to help me, and that was a major disaster.”

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Reed said there were five people in the house, and all but one escaped with broken bones. Reed was wiped out financially.

He said the second tragedy in as many years set him off on a spiritual search for answers to life’s big questions: “How does this work? What are we doing here? What are we giving our time to? And what's the purpose of life?”

In search of an answer, Reed moved to San Francisco and worked in outreach programs in the financial district. He was there for 15 years before moving to Santa Barbara in 2000 to help a friend start a business venture.

In 2001, Reed met Barbara Tellefson, who worked at the Unity Shoppe. He believed that Tellefson had figured out the best model for how nonprofit organizations should run.

“We're supposed to take care of each other. We're supposed to take care of our own, and this is the best model I've seen about how a community can care for those that are struggling,” he said.

Reed partnered with Tellefson to raise $2 million in 30 days in 2002 to buy the original building in which the Unity Shoppe resided.

“It was a challenging time,” he said. “Raising a lot of money in a short period of time is not easy, and I wasn't particularly well known in town. Fundraising is kind of relational and introducing people to it, and I didn't know anybody.”

The success of finding the funding launched Reed into an effort to which he remains faithful.

“The best things that get done are in the nonprofit sector,” Reed said.

Throughout his two-decade career with the Unity Shoppe, Reed has helped more than double the number of referring agencies that utilize Unity Shoppe, thus expanding the reach that the organization has in the community.

Unity Shoppe’s impact has reached across the county while Reed has been executive director. Country singer Brad Paisley started The Store in Nashville, Tennessee, a nonprofit organization that is based off how the Unity Shoppe is run. Paisley discovered Unity Shoppe when he bought a house in Montecito and wanted to find somewhere in the community where he and his children could volunteer.

“That's gratifying to know that we were the inspiration,” Reed said.

Throughout his time at Unity Shoppe, Reed said his only regret was that he couldn’t do more.

“I was frustrated that the community awareness was so slow,” Reed said. “It was basically one tour at a time, and because of that, we were never able to raise enough money to really do this thing right. I think I always felt it was worthy of more support.”

Reed will retire after Unity Shoppe’s 36th telethon, an annual fundraiser that happens at Christmastime and is hosted by Paisley, Kenny Loggins and Peter Noone.

Christmas is a big time for the Unity Shoppe. More than 2,500 families are served throughout the community, and volunteers assemble 3,000 gift boxes for seniors and build handmade wooden toys and clothes.

“It'll be my last one,” Reed said. “So, it's kind of a celebration for me.”

He said he plans to spend his retirement traveling a bit more with his wife and hopes to consult with other nonprofit organizations.

“The main goal initially when I first started, it was just to help," Reed said. "I recognized the vision. I agreed with it. I wanted to help make it happen.”

— Noozhawk staff writer Grace Kitayama can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.

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