A feast with force

Judy Heppinstall knew she didn’t have the energy to cook for Thanksgiving this year. Her ex-husband is in hospice care with emphysema. Their only daughter, Kathleen Heppinstall, 45, died unexpectedly of a heart attack Nov.

She and her son will spend Thanksgiving with her ex-husband over a home-cooked meal delivered to their home.

“It’s such a God-given relief,” said Heppinstall of Eaton Rapids. “I can’t begin to tell you how thankful I am that they are doing this to help celebrate a time that will be a hard time I know.”

Heppinstall is receiving dinner from the Cristo Rey Community Center in Lansing, one of the few and the largest community Thanksgiving Day meals with delivery in the area.

“I think that the idea of people who are giving up their day with family to cook and prepare and then to deliver these meals to obviously people who can’t do it for themselves, is the greatest show of love for a fellow human being I think I could ever imagine, Heppinstall said.

Dinner with dignity

The Cristo Rey Thanksgiving Day Feast is a meal with a mission. Beyond the numbers — and the numbers are impressive (402 meals served or delivered, more than 100 volunteers) — it aims to bring dignity into the dining experience for those on hard times.

A maitre d' greets guests at the door. Waiters and waitresses with corsages take dinner orders. Turkey or ham? A dessert cart makes its rounds. Everything is home cooked. Deliveries began four years ago.

“This is the most important day of the year for some people,” said Michael Hood, the dinner’s coordinator. “To do something like this it should be vital and vibrant.”

It takes an army of volunteers, a B-52 full of pies and months of planning and scrambling to pull off a meal of this scale. Hood says Cristo Rey starts from zero each year seeking turkey donations, drivers, servers — the works.

He hopes to find an underwriter to help allow him and his volunteers to focus on making the experience enriching and rewarding.

“To get through this holiday with a warm meal is very important if it helps them get to that job interview or their kids get to tell their schoolmates their dad made a great dinner,” he said. “I do this because I understand the pain people go through.”

The face and depth of need is sometimes masked. Those receiving meals range from the homeless to the underemployed to seniors who live alone.

Some are just a paycheck away from dire straits. Others resist even the hint of help.

“There are people in this town who won’t go to the VOA or the Salvation Army,” he said. “They see that clientele as not who they are. The face of hunger is changing in this town.”

Hood had recently ended a five-day fast.

“To want to do (a fast) is one thing, but to not be able to eat or not be able to feed your children, to not have the energy or resources to make those decisions is devastating,” he said. “Lansing didn’t have a recession; it’s a depression.”

Outpouring of giving

Lansing has a wealth of community Thanksgiving dinner offerings for the homeless and less fortunate ahead of the actual holiday.

Basket and box drives like the Old Town Commercial Association’s Compassionate Feast prepare meals for families to pick up and prepare at home themselves. The Open Door Ministry day shelter for the homeless on Capitol Avenue expects to serve more than 150 people at its Thanksgiving meal Thursday. Pilgrim United Methodist Church will hand out backpacks and to-go turkey meals Saturday near the Lansing Center. The Salvation Army is serving a traditional Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 24.

But many service agencies close on Thanksgiving Day to give staff a day off to enjoy with their families. Even the Volunteers of America shelter will close this year.

The City Rescue Mission will offer its regular midday and evening meals on Thanksgiving Day, and expects to serve more than 100 at each seating, said communications manager Laura Grimwood. The City Rescue Mission is open 365 days a year, she said.

St. Gerard Catholic Church joins Cristo Rey in offering special Thanksgiving Day sit-down meals and deliveries. Coordinator Mike Hudson said he expects to serve 250 to 270 this year. The meal, which has been served since 1987, is funded by the church. Dean Transportation donates a bus and driver to take guests to dinner and back home.

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Counting Cristo Rey, the three combined serve about 900 meals, a third of them delivered.

Add in boxed efforts like New World Flood and Compassionate Feast and sit-down shelter dinners before Thanksgiving and there are nearly another 600.

Massive volunteer effort

“It’s a lot of work to feed this many people, ” Hood of Cristo Rey said.

This year's event touts a volunteer corps of about 120 people on Thanksgiving day cooking, driving, preparing, serving, cleaning, running errands, shopping.

The scale of prep can be overwhelming: hundreds of pounds of potatoes, 200 squashes, nearly 100 turkeys.

It’s all hands on deck in what Hood calls “kitchen chaos.”

“My 76-year-old mother made 20 some pies last year,” Hood said.

Donations come from a variety of sources who either hear about the dinner through word of mouth or whom Hood solicited personally. Last year he said Meijer contributed gift cards for food.

“Grand Traverse Pie brought us a B52 full of pies and dropped them off,” he said. “We had so many we didn’t have any place to put them. We borrowed a refrigerator truck to hold them overnight.”

Care Free shepherd’s call

Lisa Saltman coordinates the behavioral health division of Care Free Clinic in Mason, which offers medical and dental care to low-income residents.

She said she’s been longtime friends with Hood. She began to network with him to make her patients aware of the Thanksgiving dinner service.

Last year she sent 50 clients to Cristo Rey.

This year she has referred 200.

“The people that I know know my nature,” said Saltman, whose father, Barry Saltman, created Care Free 10 years ago. “If I’m calling with an offer like that, I don’t think there’s any embarrassment or shame.”

“I absolutely think it makes a difference,” she said. “Think of people who are alone, who are emotionally or financially unable to prepare any type of food for themselves, except microwave food.”

“That they will have physical contact with someone and give them a warm meal — you can’t quantify that.”

Oven King

Thanksgiving morning starts at 7:30 for Fred Schaard, the “Oven King” of Cristo Rey.

A longtime volunteer, Schaard is one of a couple of key kitchen coordinators on Thanksgiving and a right hand to Hood.

He commands a small space that delivers so much.

“We have to flip things around a lot,” he said.

There’s only six burners. There are convection ovens but “they’re very old.”

“The other oven, no one knows how to light but me.”

Serving is a family affair for Schaard, who is joined by his three sons and their wives and girlfriends.

“To me it gives dignity to people who are in need,” he said.

Schaard says he’s been where some of the guests are coming from.

“The biggest problem I had as a child was being embarrassed we couldn’t go to the store to buy Thanksgiving dinner, someone brought it over,” he said.

Schaard was the second from the youngest in a family of eight. He said his father was a civil engineer in WWII who was a prisoner of war.

He “suffered psychologically from it,” Schaard said of his father.

His father was placed in a mental hospital and his family struggled.

“I’ve lived in a condemned home with no heat at one point,” he said.

Schaard is the president of Rehmann Financial, a major financial services firm.

His early struggles “gave me a drive,” he said.

“The sky’s the limit. If you walk a tightrope with no net, you’ve gotta make it,” he said.

Schaard said giving is more than writing a check.

“Some people like to give money just to make them feel good, but I think you have to get a little more involved,” he said.

Examples of cities banning the homeless like Manteca, Calif., are not the way to address the needs of the poor, he said.

“That’s not the solution,” he said. “People need to not be afraid of them. Get a little more involved with one person, instead of giving people 20 bucks here and 20 bucks there.

You have to face your fears and look them in the face.”

Most of the guests he serves at Cristo Rey “are just down and out on their luck. It’s not because they don’t want to or can’t. We’re sharing one really good experience. We’re the preeminent Thanksgiving dinner in town.”

Lightspeed

Jason Schreiber was recently looking for a Thanksgiving cause for his company, Lightspeed, to support.

He contacted the Old Town Commercial Association, which pointed him to Cristo Rey.

Cristo Rey was still in need of some food and supplies.

“We’re really happy to be involved. Hopefully we’re as helpful as they need us to be,” said Schreiber, CEO of the East Lansing-based company.

The fiber optics Internet service provider has a “double bottom line principle,” Schreiber said.

“We’re not just focused on profit, but we’re also trying to create other benefits in the community — social justice, the environment.”

The company encourages volunteering, even offering a paid day for volunteering.

Lightspeed is donating $50 from each new account to Cristo Rey. It is also matching donations from their staff.

“Our goal was to raise $5,000 in a week, and we’re right on track to hit that goal,” he said. “This is a great way to tie our community outreach and our community investment principle into the business.

Returning the favor

Hood and Hudson said that often folks who have a need would still rather give of their time as a volunteer than accept the gift of dinner.

Hudson says he always makes more room for volunteers even if he doesn’t need them, in order to let them save face and pride.

Many are elderly who live alone and want to share in a community event.

Hood shares similar stories.

“I got a call two years ago from a guy named Mike,” he said. “It was late. We had enough volunteers.We had enough drivers but he wanted to help.

“I said 'Please join us. Can you bring a bird or a dish to cook?’ He said, ‘I can’t cook. I’ve got a hot plate.’ He was living in a hotel on Washington Avenue. His girlfriend had a broken arm and couldn’t cook.

I said, ‘Come do dinner with us. If you want you can help do dishes.’ They came. That shows how deep the spirit of giving can go., even among our patrons.”

Extending the reach

Hood is already eyeing future Thanksgivings.

“I need to look now at how we grow this event. I don’t think we’re reaching all the folks who need this,” he said.

“We need to improve our infrastructure so that we can increase our capacity to do more in the community,” he said.

Resources are spread out around Lansing. Everyone is helping everyone.

Christian Family Services refers the needy. Major grocers like Meijer and Wal-Mart donate supplies, gift cards and food.

Todd “T.J.” Duckett through his nonprofit, New World Flood, donates more than 1,000 turkeys to organizations around town.

It's a chain of people, said Duckett. The thing I love about it is each individual person does what they can to create a flood of change, a flood of purpose.

Still, Hood holds out hope for a regular sponsor or benefactor to keep the Cristo Rey effort growing.

The finest work I do all year is this day of Thanksgiving,” he said. “I get to be in service shoulder to shoulder with these people who are so selfless and so caring.

The dinner is more than a symbolic gesture or volunteer photo-op, he said.

It has real and lasting impact in resources, memories and inspiration.

“It’s not a Band-Aid,” Hood said. “It’s a jump start hopefully.”