In Ocoee, during a period when Black families were being terrorized, Sister Gail Grimes waited outside their homes in her car, ready to warn a resident of danger or call the police, U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost recalled after her death. Sister Monica Gail Grimes, a Catholic nun who spent more than five decades organizing farmworkers and fighting segregation across Central Florida, died Sunday, July 5, 2026, at the age of 88.

Grimes, who was originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was one of four Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, based in Baltimore, who answered a call from Bishop William Borders, the first bishop of the newly formed Diocese of Orlando, to begin a farmworker ministry in Apopka that Global Sisters Report dates to 1971; Grimes herself later recalled moving to Apopka in January 1975, in an oral history interview archived by the University of Central Florida. She, Sister Ann Kendrick, Sister Cathy Gorman and Sister Teresa McElwee moved into a small house in the city's Black farmworker neighborhood. For their first two years there, the sisters mostly listened. Kendrick later described the period as simply "hanging out" with families, getting to know them and finding out what they actually wanted, rather than arriving with programs already decided.

What the community said it needed became the shape of the ministry. "It was the people who were the ones who decided they needed a clinic, and we worked with them," Grimes told Bay News 9 in 2017. "They decided they needed housing, and we worked with them." That approach spun off what is now Community Health Centers, the housing nonprofit Homes in Partnership, and Self-Help Credit Union, according to a Global Sisters Report interview with Kendrick, the seeds of what grew into Hope CommUnity Center.

The sisters had set their own terms with the diocese from the start. "The agreement with the bishop was that we would not just serve Catholic farmworkers, that we would serve farmworkers ... what their needs were, not based on establishing churches or establishing missions, but that we would work with all farmworkers," Grimes said in a 2014 oral history interview archived by the University of Central Florida, as Central Florida Public Media reported.

Racial justice work ran alongside the farmworker organizing from the beginning. "She fought against segregation when she arrived in Central Florida," said Felipe Sousa Lazaballet, Hope CommUnity Center's executive director. "Here in Apopka she organized farmworkers and the Black community in South Apopka for justice." In 1983, after a series of freezes wiped out Central Florida's citrus crop and left thousands of farmworkers unemployed with no compensation for their lost wages, Grimes and three other sisters joined orange picker Tirso Moreno to organize unemployed workers in Mascotte. That effort became the Farmworker Association of Florida, which incorporated as a nonprofit in 1986, opened its first office in Apopka, and added a second office in Pierson the following year to reach farmworkers north of Orlando.

Hope CommUnity Center itself did not have a permanent home until 2007, after decades of fundraising. A second campus followed in South Apopka in February 2016, backed in part by a 250,000 dollar gift from Disney. Over the years, the ministry that began with four sisters and a small house helped spin off six separate nonprofit organizations addressing literacy, healthcare and economic injustice in Apopka.

Grimes kept telling her own story even as the ministry grew around her. In October 2014, she sat for an oral history interview with the University of Central Florida's RICHES archive, describing the unequal public services and labor camps of 1970s Apopka and the agricultural history of nearby Lake Apopka. In 2023, she was still a familiar presence at Hope CommUnity Center's annual Fiesta, photographed speaking to the crowd.

News of her death Sunday prompted tributes from across Central Florida, The Apopka Chief reported. Sousa-Lazaballet called her "a giant among us," crediting her with "a certain level of discipline that she always brought to everything she did, constantly reminding us (about) the power of everyday people to do great things." Frost, who represents Orlando in Congress, called her loss "devastating" and said "people don't understand how much of a pillar of the community she is, and also Sister Ann."

The ministry Grimes helped start in a small house in 1971 is still visible across Apopka: in Community Health Centers, Homes in Partnership and Self-Help Credit Union, in the Farmworker Association of Florida she helped build out of a citrus freeze, and on the two Hope CommUnity Center campuses on Hawthorne Avenue and Park Avenue that carry the work forward today. She is survived in the community she built by Sister Ann Kendrick, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and the generations of Apopka families who came through Hope CommUnity Center's doors.