Free midday meals offer warmth to needy

The line for second helpings is winding down, but it’s still thick enough that one of the diners is having a tough time getting past it to have a word with the volunteers dishing out the food.

“That was really good,” Carl Caldwell says. “Thank you very much.”

This is Caldwell’s first time back for the midday meal at Trinity United Methodist Church on Broadway in several years — he thought he’d left the homeless life behind the last time he lost his job.

“This is the first good, full meal I’ve had in a week,” he says. “I stopped by next door about a job program, so I came over to get lunch. I was really impressed with the food and how nice everyone was.”

Trinity is one of five sites where Capitol Hill Community Services offers lunch, and Caldwell is one of the 170 to 250 who eat at each meal — which adds up to more than 52,000 annually. The organization is one of the many local agencies applying for funding from this year’s Season to Share campaign.

“These people need our help temporarily,” said John Love, executive director of Capitol Hill Community Services for more than 16 years. “You aren’t supporting a lifestyle here. People come here for one reason: They are hungry. You don’t stand in line in the cold and snow for any other reason.”

During the school year, students from three area schools — Kent Denver School, Graland Country Day School and St. Anne’s Episcopal School — volunteer with the group, serving meals and cleaning up. At Trinity, Kent students come Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.

On this day, 16 students from Kent were lined up along the serving station, handing out trays of beef, potato and carrot stew, ambrosia salad with apricots, doughnuts and slices of wheat bread, while at the end of the line, a couple of their parents helped other adult volunteers pass out juice drinks and hot coffee.

“I was really surprised at how many homeless people come,” said Audrey DeGuerrera, a Kent sixth- grader who was volunteering for the second time. “Last time, there were some toddlers too. That was sad.”

More than 80 percent of the food served at the facilities, which offer meals year-round, is donated. There is no menu because no one knows what items will be available on any given day.

In Trinity’s kitchen, Shelly Occhipinti has become famous for her ability to create something out of nothing.

“They’ll be giving away carrots and potatoes at one place, and chickens somewhere else, and maybe a little bit of this and that from another place,” Love said. “Shelly turns it all into a balanced meal every time.”

Love, who took over the director position after several years of volunteering as a Kent parent, oversees the agency’s $203,000 annual budget, which comes primarily from a foundation that took a hit to its portfolio this past year.

“Donations are way down,” Love said. “Our numbers of meals served increased at the beginning of the year but have stabilized, but we are definitely down in what we’re taking in, both in food and money.”

For those coming in for lunch, the economic situation sometimes means making tough choices.

“I just got into some highly subsidized housing,” said James Patrick Sims. “But I still have to come over here sometimes because I can’t pay for my food all the time. But it’s good food, and this is a relaxed atmosphere.”

Student volunteer DeGuerrera said that she wasn’t nervous her first time serving because everyone was so nice and polite.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but so many of them come up afterward and say, ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. “They tell you how they were so hungry, and this was what they needed.”