In addition to feeding needy seniors, she opened Drexell & Honeybee’s up as a restaurant for the general public, offering lunches for $3 a plate, thinking she could help others, too, by providing cheap, tasty meals. It didn’t take long for reality to come calling.

“Of course, I was making no money,” she said. “That was okay by me, except for the fact that I had rent and utilities to pay, and food costs kept rising.”

A friend suggested she reach out to the food bank in nearby Mobile. A conversation with folks there introduced her to the intricacies of the nonprofit world. She realized if she wanted to continue making meals for the needy and wanted to use food bank supplies to help her do it, she’d have to create her own nonprofit. So, she did. In 2002, she closed the restaurant. With the assistance of the local library and an attorney friend, in a few months, Lisa had her 501(c)(3). She created a small food bank for Brewton, supplied by the Mobile food bank and other donations, and used the food to nourish the area's poor and elderly once again. She called it Carlisa, in honor of a friend who’d recently passed. She built a basic structure with a storeroom and kitchen in her backyard and was soon cooking almost 100 meals a day and delivering them as far as 40 miles away.

“I was back doing what I knew I was supposed to do,” she says.

She did it for three years, and in that time made two journeys to bring attention to issues she encountered in her work. In 2003, she wrote a letter to Alabama Governor Bob Riley outlining her area’s hunger problems and walked the 105 miles to Montgomery to hand-deliver it. In 2005, she wrote a similar letter to President George Bush and walked 900 miles from Brewton to Washington, D.C., in a trip that took 54 days. She didn’t get to see either man.

“But I completed what God laid on my heart,” she says.

On her return from the D.C. walk, Lisa’s focus on the elderly was widened when she took a job at the local community college’s student center.

“I was running the nice new kitchen they had, and they were fine with me using the facilities to make meals for my seniors, too. It gave me the space I needed to better serve them,” she says. But she soon noticed many of the students scrounging change to get a pack of crackers from the vending machines instead of buying meals from her.

“These students were hungry; they were doing without to pay for school and books,” she says. She began offering “no cash, no problem” meals, getting donations and often augmenting with her own money, just as she’d done to feed her seniors. With this experiment, the idea for the Drexell & Honeybee’s of today began to take shape.