Sometimes I am a little slow on the uptake. I just plug along doing what I do, supporting staff and volunteers, listening to the stories of Soup Kitchen guests, preparing reports, and so on. But sometime toward the end of the year, I came to my senses and realized just how busy we had gotten. It seemed that every day we were filling tables with hungry people, sometimes adding an extra table to accommodate the increasing number of people. Volunteers would call to serve, and we would find that there were no openings for them for weeks, sometimes months. A food donation would come in and before we could sort, log and put it away another one would come in. There was never a sense of catching up. The only bright spot was that Christine had been back since July and was more than doing her share of the work and keeping all of us sane.

In 2009, we served an average of 39 people per day, the highest dailyaverage in our history. During the month of March of 2010, the average was up to 41 people. These numbers are easy to see and analyze; the increase of donors and volunteers is more difficult to track. Because we limit the number of volunteers in the kitchen and dining room, the number of volunteer hours logged tends to be pretty stable. But at the end of 2009, we were either turning eager volunteers away or scheduling them out three or more months. We often could not accommodate volunteers needing to serve hours within a limited time frame.

One of the things that we do that I consider of great importance is acknowledge donations. This is most often done with a personal letter and takes up the bulk of Sue’s time at the front desk. During and just after the peak of the holiday giving, she pumps out 30 or more letters per week. Besides acknowledging gifts of cash and in kind, donations are logged withtheir value, estimated in the case of in kind gifts. When the community is as generous as this one is, we end up with stacks of cases of food. Goodproblem, lots of work to log, organize, and acknowledge. Our data base of donors increased almost 25% from 2008 to the end of 2009. This is all good stuff, but the indication of it all is that WE ARE BIGGER. We are serving more meals. There are more people in the community interested inhelping us do this. We strive to make volunteer experiences as good as they can be and let donors know how important they are.

So what does this mean? We have increased staff hours. Christine is now working four days per week. Andrew was hired to cover the kitchen while Jenn furthers her education.  A volunteer is scheduled to work in the office most every day to help with donations and to be on-call for kitchen duty. Additional space on the third floor is being rented from the First Baptist Church for office space which will open up more room for storage on the first floor as well as allow us to give more space for the clothing closet.

The ministry of the Sonshine Soup Kitchen is vital to a population of unemployed people in our community, and the current economy shows little sign of improving in the immediate future. So here we are doing whatwe have been doing for over 20 years and doing more of it. Here’s thebottom line. Before I realized we were growing and needed morehelp, God provided Christine. Calls from volunteers and food donations thatseemed to be in excess of our need four months ago was God providingfood and labor to handle the busy springtime. Please know and be blessed that God chose YOU to be our provision and answer to prayers that were not even voiced yet. My thanks go to all of you who support this ministry. May God bless you in all you do.