Hope Dining Room is going very well on the 3rd Monday of every month. Our third lunch was served on October 19, 2020. We prepared 50 lunches (Substantial Nachos – with taco-seasoned  ground beef, kidney beans and cheese sauce served over taco chips,  with a side of salsa.)  Included in the lunch was a beautiful fresh salad (greens from St. Nicholas’s Community garden as well as fresh and colorful peppers and grated carrots). We served 38 meals and took 12 leftover meals to the Empowerment Center.

Hope Dining Room is going to give Christmas Bags to all guests who come in for lunch on December 18, 2020. Homemade cookies and hotel-sized toiletries are still needed for those bags. If you would like to contribute to that effort, you may put the items in the “Hope Dining Room” box, outside the office at St. Thomas’s.  Please let me know if you can make cookies and I will deliver them to the “packers”.

St. Nicholas is doing a Mitten Tree in January, so as the time draws closer, I will put another box outside the office at St. Thomas’s for mittens.                         

Madeline Johnson

 Hope Dining Room is going well on the third Monday of every month. Our first lunch was the 3rd Monday of August and we gave out 35 meals. For our lunch in September, we made 50 meals and gave out 47 and took 3  left-over meals to the Empowerment Center. We had 3 volunteers from St. Thomas’s and 3 from St. Nicholas, including one who picks and prepares veggies from their Community Garden. Our next lunch will be served on October 19, 2020. If you are free that day at lunchtime, we’d LOVE to hear from you!.

We are still doing” grab and go lunches”, served from a table outside. Social distancing is observed and masks are required. 

Hope Dining Room is thinking about Christmas bags, which they distribute to all comers who show up,  the Friday before Christmas. They fill the bags with socks, a small flashlight, a mask, hand sanitizer, a knit hat, small hotel-sized toiletries and cookies. 

They do 10-15 bags for children and fill them with a coloring book, crayons, a small toy, mittens, child-sized hat and mask and cookies. They fix about 70 bags for men and 30 for women. If you would like to donate any of these items, there will be a box outside the office in early December, so start gathering.          

Respectfully submitted,  
Madeline Johnson <mad1240@comcast.net>