GREENFIELD — For the past five and a half years, volunteers with the Sunday Soup & Sandwiches program at the Episcopal Church of Saints James and Andrew have handed out homemade soup, sandwiches and snacks to neighbors in need.
After 37,100 meals, volunteers will serve the program’s last meal on Sunday, Oct. 26, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.
The program was created in March 2020 to offer an alternative to a different free meals program that had been available on the Greenfield Common, but that had been canceled amid COVID-19 health safety restrictions. Lead cook Maria Paquette started the program at her church with 50 prepared meals. Five years later, the group reached an average of 255 meals each week in 2024. This year alone, nearly 10,000 meals have been served.
While church leaders felt they could offer a temporary program to fill the void until the health safety restrictions subsided and other programs reopened, they didn’t anticipate how long the pandemic would last or how great the need for the meals would be.
The decision to end the Sunday Soup & Sandwiches program came after much consideration, with church leaders attributing the program’s end to core leaders stepping back, increased demand for meals, the parish’s limited capacity, concern for volunteer burnout and funding challenges. To greet community members with free meals, the program relies on a rotation of 40 unpaid volunteers and has been primarily funded through one-time grants, the parish’s budget and a small group of donors.
Without sufficient funding and volunteers, “We just can’t sustain it,” Paquette said, stirring a pot of minestrone soup on a busy Sunday in March after the church announced its plans to end the program in October. “It was only supposed to be a stopgap until something else happened, and then nothing else happened.”
However, the church will continue to offer Second Helpings, a free community meal served each Monday at 4:30 p.m. in partnership with Deerfield Academy.
Although the Salvation Army and the Franklin County Community Meals Program offer free meals during the week, and Stone Soup Café offers pay-what-you-can meals on Saturdays, the Sunday Soup & Sandwiches program has represented the only free meal service available on Sundays in Greenfield.
A list of community meals and food pantries in Greenfield can be found at greenfield-ma.gov/residents/food_pantries_and_meal_sites.php.
The church invites all supporters of the program to attend its 10 a.m. service on Sunday, Nov. 2, when the church will offer “a prayer of thanksgiving” for the Sunday Soup & Sandwiches program, including its leaders, volunteers, donors “and the many lives that were touched through this ministry.”
