Samaritan Center director retires from local charity
BY KATHY BARATTA Staff Writer
After more than 20 years at the helm of the Samaritan Center, Carol Puorro has retired as the center's director.

Puorro, who now lives in Brick Township, is a former Manalapan resident who along with her husband Joseph raised her family in Manalapan and took on the role of director of the Samaritan Center since it started as an outreach program through St. Thomas More Church, Manalapan.

The Samaritan Center provides food and assistance to people in need in the Manalapan-Englishtown area. The center operates out of space behind the Manalapan Senior Center, Route 522.

Puorro said she is leaving the position with a heavy heart after serving as the center's director for so many years. She said it was not her decision to retire.

The Rev. John Bambrick of St. Thomas More Church oversees the Samaritan Center's operation. He said economics led to the decision to retire Puorro and operate the center from this point on solely on a volunteer basis.

Bambrick said he and the Samaritan Center's board of directors are grateful for Puorro's 21 years of service to the center, first as a volunteer and then as an employee.

Although he declined to disclose Puorro's salary, Bambrick said, "Our treasury was almost empty, funding was low."

Bambrick said the center has enough volunteers at the present time to keep it going. He said the center will be operating under new hours: Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. The center was previously open Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Bambrick said the center would go back to the roots of the operation that was to function mainly as a food pantry. He said the Samaritan Center had always been intended to function as a food pantry and to provide food baskets for those in need at Christmas and Easter.

He noted that the Samaritan Center played a significant role in the planning and construction of the New Beginnings affordable-housing development in Manalapan, but said, "The homeless program was never supposed to be part of our program."

Noting that the Samaritan Center receives federal money for homeless programs, Bambrick said the Samaritan Center will ask the United Way, which is the clearinghouse for federal funding to individual charities, to instead give any money that was supposed to go to the Samaritan Center for homeless programs to the Open Door charity in Freehold.

Puorro, who will be honored at a retirement party at St. Thomas More on Oct. 13, said she wonders how the Samaritan Center will function under the new volunteer system and new hours.

"That phone rings constantly," she said.