Charleston’s only soup kitchen, Manna Meal, plans to make its kitchen operations fully mobile by the end of the year. (Lori Kersey | West Virginia Watch)
After unsuccessfully searching most of 2024 for a space in the city to prepare and serve food, Charleston’s only soup kitchen plans to make its kitchen operations fully mobile by the end of the year. Manna Meal will buy two 22-foot food trucks, bringing its fleet to three. Two of the vehicles will house the food preparation and the third will be for storage and the agency’s food pantry.
The change comes as Manna Meal’s lease with St. John’s Episcopal Church, its home since the program began in 1976, comes to an end Dec. 31. Manna Meal stopped serving meals from the downtown church in November, but kept on using the kitchen there for food preparation. Since then, meals have been served from the former Garnet Career Center, at 422 Dickinson Street.
While the kitchen operations will be mobile, there are no plans to move the community dining area from Garnet, CEO Amy Wolfe said.
“We are very committed to that, and I will say that Garnet has been an amazing group,” Wolfe said. “They see the merit in the mission. They see the vision. They have been a great partnership.”
Wolfe said the organization has been looking all year for a new place to house its kitchen. The handful of locations that were considered have fallen through or were not a good fit because of their size or their proximity to schools or daycare centers. Wolfe said it’s also difficult finding a place where the surrounding community will welcome its clients, some of whom are homeless and have substance abuse and mental health issues.
“Truly, no one wants us in their backyard,” Wolfe said. “That’s unfortunate to me. I think it also speaks greatly as to the climate, which is in not just Charleston, but many communities across the country right now. It’s regrettable that individuals that are experiencing poverty hardships are not receiving necessarily all the support that they deserve.”
When the organization stopped serving from St. John’s, it was after an incident where a Manna Meal client allegedly made a lunging motion at a mother and a child on the property of a nearby school. Last September, a man died on the church’s parking lot after falling on his knife during a fight.
Even among neighbors of the Garnet Career Center, the organization hasn’t always been welcomed. For about a month this summer, a nearby property owner played a “high-pitched, horrible” noise from a sound machine during the soup kitchen’s meal times, Wolfe said. The sound — which Wolfe said was meant to deter Manna Meal clients from coming onto the business owner’s property — stopped after the Charleston Police Department became involved, a city official confirmed.
“The message is: you’re less than,” Wolfe said. “And that’s a really unfortunate place that society can be. I think it’s time for us to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every human being, regardless of economic status, and work towards creating a more equitable society for all.”
In another instance, the organization was working to purchase a space and had completed a structural analysis when word got out in the neighborhood.
“People were very upset, and so for the sake of the people that we serve — because first and foremost, that is who we are here for — we decided that that location was not the best,” Wolfe said. “And we listened to the community’s concern, and we took that to heart.”
The change to mobile operations will happen no later than the end of the year, Wolfe said. The two additional food trucks are in production now and expected to arrive by October.
The soup kitchen serves two meals a day to between 650 and 700 people daily, between the East End dining area and a food truck on the West Side. In total last year, the program provided more than 218,000 meals and distributed more than 16,000 food pantry bags. Manna Meal does not have income or other requirements about who can eat. Wolfe said the demand for the feeding program increased during the pandemic and has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
She said the demand for the food pantry continues to surprise her, serving people that would not traditionally come to a community kitchen, such as single parents and people living on Social Security benefits, Wolfe said. Last year when the benefits provided by the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, decreased to pre-pandemic levels, Manna Meal saw a 60% increase in demand for its food pantry, she said.
“The new food trucks not only will allow us to continue serving the same amount of people in which we are, we really believe that it’s going to allow us to reach more people across Charleston, and expand our impact,” Wolfe said.
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