Congratulations to Layla Drawdy, one of our 2017 Wonder Women.
When people in Plant City need a helping hand, Layla Drawdy is quick to offer hers. Whether it’s something she can do herself or with her Hardwood BBQ team, Drawdy believes any act of kindness can make a difference for any struggling person.
When she says that, she’s speaking from experience.
Drawdy can’t forget the days when she was one of those people standing in line at the United Food Bank of Plant City. She remembers waiting at churches around town to receive holiday meals. She remembers working several jobs at a time to raise children as a single mother out of high school, sometimes wondering if she’d be able to eat or buy gas for her car. There was no government assistance — only what she could earn for herself and what she was given by strangers who offered to help.
“It was those situations that I’ve carried with me,” Drawdy said. “I will never, ever forget where I came from.”
Like wood for a smoker, these experiences fuel her fire.
“It’s very important to be that way as a human being,” Drawdy said. “But as a community, especially this one, it’s very important to me.”
“What I do now — what we do, what my husband does with me — that stayed with me all these years,” Drawdy said. “Just random strangers, sometimes people that I worked with that I didn’t know very well back then, would just do random acts of kindness and help me when I least expected it and when I needed it most desperately. I don’t even think any of those people knew how desperate I was.”
Through hard work, Drawdy was able to improve her quality of life. She took classes at the University of Florida—IFAS campus in Plant City when she could, capitalizing on an employer’s tuition assistance program, and worked several jobs in the agriculture field until landing her current gig as a fertilizer and chemical sales representative for Diamond R Fertilizer in Plant City.
When she met her husband, Dustin, two more children came into the picture. So did Hardwood BBQ, a passion project for the Drawdys that later became their biggest community service asset.
After linking up with friends and forming the team to compete in Pig Jam six years ago, Layla Drawdy decided it would only be fair to the team volunteers for any money they raised to be donated to charity. To this day, Hardwood is volunteer-run and does not make any money — every dollar of profit gets pumped back into the community, whether it’s an entity like the United Food Bank or individuals like Nathan Dodds, whom Hardwood has assisted during his battle with cancer.
Drawdy said Kiolbassa Smoked Meats, which Dodds’s mother works for, plays a major part in Hardwood’s ability to cook for community service. The San Antonio-based company regularly donates meat to the barbecue team, though Drawdy said the team also works with several other sponsors in the Plant City and Tampa Bay areas when service events or competitions come up.
Though Drawdy may be best-known for her work with Hardwood BBQ, she does make time for her own ventures. She likes to help families in need of school supplies, clothes and meals during the holiday season.
“That’s really important to me because that was some of the toughest times for me, as a single parent,” she said.
Most recently, Drawdy and the Hardwood team cooked hundreds of pounds of food to feed first responders, linemen and hungry people around Plant City for free after Hurricane Irma passed through the area. Projects like that, Drawdy said, are exhausting but necessary.
“You never know how you might impact somebody’s life in a positive way just by helping them,” she said.
