Community meal program idles as volunteers focus on other food distribution

Community Assistance Program’s (CAP) free meal program for people experiencing food insecurity won’t be returning to Blaine Senior Center anytime soon as organizers focus on other local food distribution opportunities. The program, which paused during the pandemic shutdowns in March 2020, will remain idle because of logistics such as volunteer numbers, time and resources.

The program fed anywhere from 70 to 100 people experiencing food insecurity once a week on Wednesday evenings. About 10 church and business teams would rotate every few months to shop and cook groceries in the senior center kitchen, which CAP executive director Dan DeMent said is the only kitchen that can support the program in Blaine.

DeMent said he’s not confident the program would be able to bring all of the teams back partly because of costs; it costs a team about $1,000 per year but DeMent estimates that number is higher with inflation. Teams also have about 10 volunteers, which may be hard to find, and volunteers working in the kitchen need to have their food-handling certification, he added. The senior center also stopped serving congregate meals during the pandemic. 

“We don’t know if, or when, we’ll be able to bring the program back,” DeMent said.

The program started at Peace Arch City Café’s old building across from the police station in 2011. Volunteers started putting on a meal once a week that served 10-15 people and about a year later moved it to the senior center to serve anyone, with a focus on those experiencing food shortages.

“There were a number of benefits,” DeMent said. “It wasn’t just helping people who were food insecure.”

CAP board member Laura Vogee, who ran the program, said restarting it would be similar to rebuilding it from the ground up. 

“It’s not just the senior center, we’d have to get enough teams together and get the leadership to oversee and run it,” Vogee said. “There’s a lot of pieces to put back together if we were to do the community meal program.”

The nonprofit doesn’t have plans to bring it back right now, Vogee said partly because she’s now running CAP’s Food Connection program that started in April 2020.

The food distribution program serves community members surplus foods from restaurants that food banks are unable to accept. The food is distributed 2:30-3:30 p.m. every Tuesday at Blaine Christian Fellowship, at 902 Adelia Street. To sign up, email food@blainecap.org and include a name and phone number or call 360/392-8484. More information is available at blainecap.org/food-connection.

“We thought it was a very worthwhile program but we want to do it right and sustain it,” DeMent said of the community meals.