Feb 23, 2020 7 min read

The list of efforts that Gisele Fetterman has initiated to help those who need it is a long one.

“My message in my work has been to not write anyone off,” she told members of Woman’s Club of Upper St. Clair, who hosted her as guest speaker at their Feb. 18 luncheon. “There is immense value in all of us.”

Yet, the wife of Lt. Gov. John Fetterman shared what most people would consider disturbing information.

“I joke, but it’s true that I get more hate mail than my husband does, about 10 times the volume,” she said.

Her pleasant expression as she delivered the revelation contrasted sharply with the gasps by those in attendance who were shocked that someone with a seemingly limitless track record of altruism would be treated in such a manner. Heck, she even offered to help clear the tables after lunch at Christ United Methodist Church in Bethel Park.

But it’s difficult to imagine Gisele Fetterman with anything but a smile, even through the vitriol pointed in her direction primarily because she was born in another country.

Such anti-immigrant attacks ignore what she has accomplished in her hometown of Braddock, where she founded a free store for people who have trouble affording much of anything, and in the Harrisburg area, where she opened the pool at the lieutenant governor’s mansion – the Fettermans decline to live there – for summer learn-to-swim programs.

“My work has always been based on pain,” she said, “whether it’s pain that I experience or pain that I witness: How do I respond to this pain with something beautiful?”

Pain constitutes a major part of her life’s story, at least the early stages of it. In numerous interviews, starting when her husband was Braddock’s mayor and picking up steam with his second-in-command state position, she has told of growing up amid less-than-optimal conditions in South America’s largest nation.

“I was raised by a single mom. She loved me. She read to me. I grew up surrounded by cousins in Brazil and had a really loving childhood,” Fetterman said at the luncheon, but she saw violence firsthand starting at a young age.

So her mother, Ester Resende, decided to relocate her two children to a safer environment, with little opportunity to take much with them.

“I think I’ve grown up with no attachments to material things, because at 7 I had to pack my entire life into one suitcase,” Fetterman explained.

The family took up residence in New York City, where young Gisele soon made an observation that would help guide her philanthropic actions in the future.

“We find an apartment. We’re learning our way around this new city and this new country,” she said. “And I come across a curb full of furniture.”

It happened to be trash day, and with it came something she hadn’t encountered in Brazil.

“If you can afford something new, you find a home for what you have. If something breaks, you fix it. So it was really foreign to me,” she explained. “But as an 8-year-old whose home had no furniture at that point, it was like I was able to solve a problem. So we were able to furnish our home entirely with what we found on the curb.”

Fast-forward to 2012 in Braddock, a borough where the population had declined nearly 90% since its heyday, an unmatched figure in the United States. Her husband had spent the past seven years since his election as mayor working on a largely successful revitalization effort, and Gisele had an idea for offering further help.

“It was my anniversary, and my husband asked, ‘What do you want for your anniversary?'” she recalled. “And I said, ‘I want a shipping container.'”

She learned the sizable seagoing units went to landfills after they were deemed no longer viable, and she was determined to put one to much better use.

“I found an abandoned lot in my community,” she said. “I tracked down the owner and asked if I could have it. I had artists come and make it beautiful. We landscaped the lot, and the free store was born that day.”

Free Store 15104, named after Braddock’s ZIP Code, receives surplus and donated goods and redistributes them to neighbors in need. And in the eight years since its inception, the project has grown to serve residents all over Allegheny County.

“The first thing we did was come up with rules: Be kind. Take only what you need. And pay it forward,” Fetterman said. Her priority was making the store a welcoming place, so greeting visitors is a sign: “Wherever you came from and however you got here, we’re so glad to see you.”

That was what her first teacher in the United States said when she met Gisele, and she has taken it to heart ever since.

Much of the free store inventory represents items that would otherwise be discarded, and Fetterman took the concept in another direction by co-founding 412 Food Rescue with Leah Lizarando, who serves as the nonprofit’s chief executive officer.

“I know food insecurity firsthand,” Fetterman said about her childhood. “I also remember seeing the food that was thrown out and how shocking that was.”

In fact, the 412 Food Rescue website cites U.S. Environmental Protection data reporting Americans waste 62.5 million tons and spend $218 billion a year in “growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that is never eaten.”

The basic goal of 412 Food Rescue is to ascertain where food is on the verge of disposal – an app put into place in 2015 helps the cause – and then to pick it up and deliver it to organizations that serve those in need.

“In Allegheny County, we’ve rescued over 8 million pounds of food,” Fetterman, whose educational background is in nutrition, reported.

More of her initiatives in the past few years have included:

• An innovative gun buyback program through which those who turned in weapons were offered training by the Boilermakers Local 154 to become welders. “Fourteen are full-time welders today,” Fetterman said;
• Further improvement projects in Braddock, such as building benches for all the bus stops in the borough. For quite a while, there had been none;
• For Good PGH, which develops and implements programs to promote diversity and inclusivity;
• Repurposing a former Braddock pharmacy for the benefit of local entrepreneurs;

“It’s really the first women’s incubator space designed for the community it’s in,” Fetterman explained. “We have 11 full-time entrepreneurs who work out of this space. So overnight, Braddock got 11 more businesses.”

As second lady of Pennsylvania, she took the unprecedented step of opening the pool at what would have been her residence to the public.

“You belong here,” a sign announces, and last summer, hundreds of youngsters learned the essential skill of swimming.

“For most of them, it was their first time in a pool,” Fetterman said.

To assist with her efforts, Woman’s Club of Upper St. Clair members presented her with items they collected on behalf of the free store, plus a check. The women also collected essentials for the Dormont-based Foster Love Project to put in backpacks for children.

Each month, in fact, the club designates a deserving recipient for their philanthropy, to go along with $250,000 in scholarships that members have made available over the years. Last year, they awarded $16,000.

All of that is right in line with what Gisele Fetterman is all about, no matter where she happened to be born.

“This is a tweet that I put out the day my husband won: Pennsylvania, your Second Lady is a formerly undocumented immigrant,” she said. “Coming from a very, very invisible childhood it’s quite a contrast to be able to kind of live in my truth and share my story and do that work that I do.”