Walking into the First Presbyterian Church you are greeted with a warm atmosphere and the smell of food. Friendly faces greet you including the one of Sarah Sanders, the former event coordinator of 20 years for Hot Meals.
“It [Hot Meals] was happening before me and I just got involved as a volunteer,” Sanders said. “Then the coordinator stepped down like I did, and they asked ‘does anyone want to do it?’ and I thought ‘it can’t be that hard, I can do it’, so I did it.”
Although Sanders was, and still is, a big part of making Hot Meals what it is it’s bigger than just a small community program.
“Hot Meals is a free meal program under Love Chapel, so it’s under Love Chapel’s mission to provide emergency food for people,” Sanders said.
Every Friday night a group of people come to the church in hopes of getting a meal.
“We have about 80 people come in for dinner every Friday. We give them all firsts and seconds and three take homes,” Sanders said.
With a program like this, many volunteers are necessary. One of those volunteers is Sophomore Izzy McGill.
“We serve a main course dinner, dessert, and also food to box up for them to have throughout the week,” McGill said. “We usually serve them for about an hour. Once we are out of main course meals, we box the rest up for them.”
Violet Dornfeld(CN ‘29), is also a volunteer, and has been volunteering for six months.
“I usually get here a little earlier and if you get here earlier you can help cook or set tables and chairs,” Dornfeld said. “If you get here around 4 or 4:30 you can help serve the food. Then after the food is served you can help clean up.”
With so many volunteering, jobs can be filled easily.
“I like to think there is a role for everyone. There’s people cooking, setting up the gym, organizing donations, etc,” Sanders said.
Around the holiday season, Hot Meals always is in need of more volunteers.
“During the holidays it gets cold, and when it gets cold people want to come in and get out of the cold,” Sanders said. “The more volunteers we have, means more food for the people who need it.”
The program does more than just provide people in need with food.
“We like to think of it as ‘how can we partner with you to get what you need,’” Sanders said. “We never like to think of it as a hand out, or like look how generous we are to give you this food, it’s more like ‘let’s all, have dinner together.’”
In the Hot Meals program, the volunteers also strive to make it a welcoming environment for the recipients.
“I hope to not only give them [the recipients] food, but also somewhere to go to have people to support them and that they know that there is help everywhere,” McGill said.
The volunteers also learned many unverbalized lessons to take with them through life.
“The biggest lesson to me is to never even begin to think about judging people or their situation,” Sanders said.
