Every Tuesday and Wednesday, Rosi Bolatagici shops the dock to find food to fill the shelves at the Pacific Islander Community Association of Washington (PICA-WA) pantry in Federal Way.

The pantry stocks dried beans, packaged applesauce and other typical food bank fare — but Bolatagici is always hoping for fresh items. All the local agencies are there, she says, going through food resources provided by the Food Lifeline to try to provide for their communities.

Bolatagici is the Pasifika Food Networks Manager at PICA-WA and runs the pantry, which is open three Thursdays a month from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., or until the food runs out.

The focus is on supporting Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander families facing food insecurity specifically, but the pantry also doesn’t shut the door on anybody who needs access to food.

While the pantry has only been in existence since August 2024, PICA-WA’s food distribution program first started in 2021 during the height of the pandemic.

From 2021 through 2024, Bolatagici managed the packing and delivery of about 500 food boxes each week in partnership with United Way of King County.

“I saw how happy people were when they got the food. And that, in turn, blessed me and made me happy,” she said.

For her efforts to fight local food instability, Bolatagici has been named the Mirror’s Hometown Hero for May 2025.

Bolatagici explained that as she has gotten deeper into the work, it has made her realize that “it’s not just about the food you give out…there’s policies behind this food. There’s all kinds of stuff that is also making us sick because of how bad the system is set up.”

On top of maintaining food distribution at PICA-WA in Federal Way, she now also works regionally and nationally to speak up for food justice.

As part of the Community Justice Alliance through Food Lifeline, she traveled to Washington, D.C., recently to fight cuts to SNAP benefits through the Farm Bill.

Federal cuts and funding instability recently lost her the opportunity to start a 1 acre community farm for PICA-WA food production and programming, she said, and she worries about the impacts of the proposed cuts to programs supporting nutrition, Medicaid and farmers.

She has pivoted to finding ways to help her community access fresh, healthy food with the resources available. She advocates for her community to decolonize their diets to focus on more fresh produce and less on commonly used canned products like Spam and corned beef.

“We are so addicted to it now…it causes a lot of sicknesses. It causes diabetes…kidney disease,” Bolatagici said of the ultra-processed, high fat, high sodium foods.

Although Bolatagici keeps an eye out for opportunities to provide fresh ingredients like taro, sweet potatoes, bok choy and plantain, she is also balancing availability, cost, shelf stability and more.

Lately she is starting to pivot to explore how to help her community utilize more ingredients that are available here to cook traditional dishes.

She recently partnered with NW Kidney Center to host a cooking class. She prepared the leafy green chard the same way she would traditionally prepare bok choy in Fijian cuisine and showed how to use mackerel like they might cook a fish from home. The meal was rounded out with some taro that needed to get used before it went bad.

When she first moved to the mainland U.S. from Fiji, Bolatagici said one of the first things she looked for was cassava, a starchy root vegetable. Twenty years later, ingredients like cassava are easier to find in a typical grocery store, but it can still be a challenge to find many favorite ingredients.

Over the years, Bolatagici has adapted and expanded her own diet, just as she is helping her community to do now.

“One of the biggest things has been to just be open to other people’s culture, to accept it, but to never lose myself as I go through my everyday,” Bolatagici said.

In the future she plans to offer more classes blending health education and tips on adapting traditional dishes using local ingredients and to keep fighting for food access for all.

This meal features taro, mackerel and fresh chard with lemon – all ingredients from the food pantry at PICA-WA and prepared as part of a cooking class put on in partnership with PICA-WA and NW Kidney Center. Photos by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror

Rosi Bolatagici taught a cooking class highlighting how to use local ingredients to cook traditional foods and how to make healthy choices to reduce the risk of health risks like kidney disease. Photo by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror

Rosi Bolatagici sources the freshest food possible at the food pantry and says the community especially appreciates access to items like this frozen and portioned fish. Photo by Keelin Everly-Lang / the Mirror