She was just 11 when she found her way to the basement at Blessed Mother Teresa Parish on Columbia Road in Dorchester.
A neighbor — her mother’s good friend — said the food pantry there could use a hand. Could she help?
“Sure,’’ Emily Gniado said.
She showed up for her first shift that Saturday morning. And never left.
“She said they were low on volunteers and they could use some help,’’ Emily recalled this week. “It’s about helping people. I love that.’’
That was six years ago. And Emily Gniado has since become a fixture at the Mary Ann Brett Food Pantry, where she has watched the line of needy families grow from a trickle to a steady stream of 550 families a month.
“She was just a shy kid when she started, and now she could run the place,’’ said the Rev. Jack Ahern, pastor of the Dorchester Tri-Parishes of which Blessed Mother is a part. “She started helping. And then never stopped.’’
Father Ahern said 12 families with children in the parish school live in shelters. An estimated 1 in 9 people and 1 in 3 children in Eastern Massachusetts cannot be sure where their next meal will come from, he said. “That shouldn’t happen.”
People like Father Ahern and Emily Gniado didn’t need the study released Tuesday by the Boston Redevelopment Authority to know about the frightening and widening divide between Boston’s rich and poor.
Among the study’s findings: The city’s median wage is $35,273, a figure that has, in real terms, not changed for nearly 30 years.
“You almost have to choose between: Do you eat? Or do you take your medicine,’’ the pastor told me. “The need is incredible. And so is the response.’’
And so Emily is there every Saturday before cabinets of food. Soups and ravioli. Vienna sausages and chicken. Black-eyed peas and green beans. Fresh eggs and apples.
“It’s pretty amazing to see how much food can mean to people — something I take for granted all the time,’’ she said. “And people are so grateful, thanking me for something as basic as food. Pretty cool.’’
Jim Brett thinks so, too. The pantry carries the name of his mother, an Irish immigrant with a sixth-grade education who raised six kids and taught them by example.
“The parish is named after Mother Teresa,’’ said Brett, chief executive of the New England Council. “She said do small things with great love. That’s what this is about. You’re not changing the world, but you’re helping neighbors and giving them a hand. That’s what my mother always said. Give back. Help your neighbors.’’
And so on Saturday morning, 130 people will crowd into the parish hall, within eyesight of the pantry’s shelves, to raise some $60,000 for the food pantry — far more money than the church gets each year in its collection baskets.
“A lot of people want to move it to a restaurant, but I want them to see where the money goes,’’ said Brett. “When I look around that room, everyone there is a giver. It’s a nice feeling to say, ‘Let’s help our neighbors.’ ’’
Emily Gniado, now 17, is a senior at Boston Latin School, and she’ll be there to help out on Saturday morning.
She’s been accepted at Penn State and UConn. She’s waiting to hear from Boston University. And she’s used those six years of Saturdays to shape a message to college admission counselors about lessons learned in a church basement, lessons about grace and gratitude and a need that never goes away.
“Each week we run into the same problem: There is just never enough!’’ she wrote in her college essay. “What is most painful about volunteering at this pantry is seeing the disappointment of people I recognize and have come to know when we have run out of fresh food.’’
“I will never stop volunteering,’’ she concluded. “After all, I need to be that grown-up who calls the next little girl to volunteer.’’
She plans to study nutrition. She’s already learned so much as the lines into the pantry stretch on and never shorten.
Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @FarragherTom.