Every week, roughly 800 people move through The Portico — downtown residents and professionals, university students and people in recovery, unhoused neighbors, lifelong churchgoers and lifelong skeptics. Most of them end up sitting at the same tables.
The Portico is the downtown expression of Hyde Park United Methodist. The campus was once First United Methodist Church of Tampa, one of the oldest congregations in the city, which closed in 2011 before the property was transferred to Hyde Park United Methodist. After a $3 million renovation, the sanctuary and a new coffee shop opened in 2017 with a simple premise: to make God’s love real through conversation, connection, and community change. Nine years later, that premise has produced a working ecosystem of ministries that reach some of Tampa's most overlooked residents.
The Cafe: transformational employment
The Portico Cafe is a social enterprise that hires people transitioning out of homelessness, addiction, and incarceration, offering job training, employment ladders, and connections to safe housing. WFLA's Daytime program profiled the Cafe in 2025. It described what sets the work apart: employees gain a community of people who understand them and help them reach the next step. From its 2017 grand opening, the Cafe was designed to bridge people emerging from homelessness and addiction to new life, and every purchase supports the Portico's homeless initiatives. It has operated profitably — or within a few thousand dollars of breakeven — since 2022, and now trains six to eight new workers a year.
The Cafe is also Florida's first Breadcoin vendor. The food-token program launched its Tampa expansion here in February 2023, making Tampa the first city in the state to accept the coins. Each $3.00 token works like a community-wide gift certificate: outreach workers and neighbors hand them out, the Cafe is fully reimbursed, and a hungry neighbor walks in and orders like any other customer. The handout becomes a choice.
The Portico Breakfast: a table, not a line
Every Sunday morning, volunteers serve a hot breakfast to 150–200 neighbors experiencing hunger or homelessness. Guests are seated and served at tables rather than queued for a tray — a distinction ABC Action News captured in 2024, when staff explained that the goal is for guests to relax their shoulders and hold their heads a little higher. Alongside the meal, The Portico hosts Bikes From the Heart that offers bikes and bike repair, and The Metropolitan Ministry Street Outreach Brigade, which connects unhoused neighbors to critical resources and documents.
Cold Weather Shelter: a warm night when it counts
The Portico is a designated adult shelter in Hillsborough County's cold weather shelter network, activated when the National Weather Service forecasts temperatures at or below 40 degrees. Volunteers mobilize on short notice to open the building, serve dinner, and send guests out with a to-go lunch. The shelter can host up to roughly 65 people overnight, and in recent winters has repeatedly reached capacity. One Thanksgiving 2025, Tampa Bay 28 reported from the Portico as the site welcomed guests for a holiday dinner in its first year running the shelter independently.
A worshipping community shaped by The Table
The Portico's 1001 Gathering is a Sunday worship community built around open tables: scripture is read, context is offered, conversation happens face to face, and communion is shared weekly. Fourteen small groups, recovery groups, and justice issue teams meet regularly, alongside meditation in the historic chapel, community yoga, and art and writing classes. Housed and unhoused participants serve, study, and lead side by side — on the conviction that proximity to the marginalized is itself a spiritual practice, not simply a social service.
Events that hold the city's memory
Each year the Portico hosts a candlelight Homeless Memorial in its breezeway beside the Homeless Jesus sculpture, reading aloud the names of every person who died unsheltered in Tampa that year. WMNF documented the 2021 service, where 112 names were read — for many, the only public commemoration of their lives. The Portico has also hosted soil ceremonies honoring Tampa residents lynched between 1892 and 1934, holiday brunches, an Easter sunrise service, an annual spring justice action, and open mic nights for artists with nowhere else to perform.
Thursday evenings the building is full with recovery groups. On Friday mornings the building fills again for Café con Tampa, the weekly civic forum that gathers community leaders over breakfast for a short talk and open Q&A — roughly 50 people each week.
The same rooms host occasional free documentary screenings, where the post-film discussion matters as much as the film, alongside the Tampa Bay Black Authors Expo, fashion shows, open mic nights, and art shows.
The Portico itself has also been on the screen rather than behind the projector: Second Chances, Tamara Nemirovsky's documentary following four Cafe employees through recovery during the pandemic, screened at the Gasparilla International Film Festival and went on to win Best Documentary at the Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival along with honors in Chile and Germany.
Visit theportico.org or call 813.222.2299.