ORCHARDS — A rotating corps of volunteers puts dinner on the table at Share Orchards, a residential shelter primarily for homeless families, each night.
It’s no small feat of coordination and resourcefulness to plan, scrounge for, then prepare that meal, said Tina Mann, a case manager at the facility. Even more so, considering there’s no telling how many they’ll have to feed.
“It could be anywhere from five to 50, so it’s a huge, huge block of ‘We don’t know,’ at any given day,” she said.
Share Orchards is designed, primarily, for families, with some space for single women, Mann said. During the wintertime, Share partners with the Winter Hospitality Overflow program at St. Andrew Lutheran Church nearby, to help people seeking shelter from the cold get a meal.
Most of the food they provide is donated.
Sometimes that means using leftovers from catered events or restaurants, which are easier to take in, for health code reasons, Mann said, since they’d need a professional kitchen.
Occasionally they have to sort through or turn away canned goods years past their expiration dates.
“But then we have the generous, wonderful people who bring in all kinds of food. That is what feeds the people, and we couldn’t do it without them,” she said. “We don’t have enough money to feed them all.”
Since most of the food comes from donations, the cooks have to be clever to make the most of the ingredients available at a given meal.
They’ve never run out of food at dinner, as far as Sunday evening cook Janelle Rogers could recall. Maybe they’ve run out of a part of the meal, she said, but never the whole thing.
Rogers started volunteering with Share last spring, along with her 15-year-old son, who was at home Sunday with a cold. They volunteer every two weeks
Rogers’ family moved to the area from Alaska about two years ago. She later reached out to a friend, a social worker, who put her in touch with Share.
“I actually have a lot of experience with food service. My mom owns a catering business, and I started working with her when I was 14, so this was kind of a natural one,” she said.
Plus, she said, her son’s high school requires students to spend time doing community service.
The other cook Sunday night, 16-year-old Nicole Nugent, has been helping out at Share for about two years, even though she forgot how she started.
“I tend to go on the internet and sign up for things. And then I stay there,” she said.
She also volunteers with the Clark County Food Bank and at a hospital, on top of going to school at Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School and her job at McDonald’s.
She came to Share right after work, still in her work clothes, save a change of pants. There was a milkshake spill, she said.
Sunday’s meal was an enchilada casserole, made from enchiladas someone brought in earlier and turkey leftovers.
The two said it’s not clear how many people they’ll be cooking for on any night.
They know, Rogers said, “by the end of dinner. We have no idea until they show up.”
Community effort
Share says it services more than 10,000 people annually, and helping with that in 2016 were more than 3,100 volunteers, who put in 31,000 hours of service.
Nicole said she didn’t have a good answer for why she volunteers, but it helps her relax, in its own stress-causing way.
Rogers said it was something she had been thinking about since moving to the area, but didn’t get around to until she was more settled.
“I kinda felt like there were lots and lots of holes in what people needed, and probably, those needs were not going to get filled through official channels” she said. “I thought it was only going to get worse.”
