ABOUT OUR HONOREE – THE REV. TOM GOODHUE
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR EMERITUS
This year we are honoring our Executive Director Emeritus, the Rev. Tom Goodhue, who retired on June 30th after 17 years as the LICC’s Executive Director. When Tom became Executive Director in 1999, we served less than half the number of individuals and families in crisis as we do now. Tom also inherited a precarious financial situation that was immediately made worse by major cuts in local government reimbursements for the work they asked us to do for them. Fortunately, generous supporters stepped in to help us continue feeding our hungry guests, and EAB bank (European American Bank, since taken over by Citibank) gave us a $25,000 unsolicited grant to feed our most vulnerable neighbors. Seventeen years later, we’re feeding more than 24,000 hungry Long Islanders a year and helping thousands more with additional family support such as housing, utilities, heat, gas, transportation, prescriptions and the like.
Before coming the LICC’s Executive Director, Tom pastored churches in Nassau, Suffolk, and Hawaii and has led youth ministry on Long Island and in California. He taught young children at the Riverside Church in Manhattan and has written several collections of stories for children. Sharing the Good News with Children (St. Anthony Messenger Press) won a Catholic Book Award. A biography he wrote for children, Curious Bones: Mary Anning and the Birth of Paleontology (published by Morgan Reynolds) was named “One of the Best Books for the Teenage Years” by the New York Public Library. He wrote another biography for adults, Fossil Hunter: The Life & Times of Mary Anning, that was published by Academica Press. He is completing a book on Kaahumanu, the Hawaiian queen who overturned taboos and welcomed missionaries, and another book about how to live ecumenically in a multi-faith world.