A soup kitchen in the basement of the Grace Mennonite Church in Steinbach is preparing to feed more than 100 people for its annual Thanksgiving dinner.

Soup's On has been around for a little more than 11 years serving the less fortunate in our community every Tuesday and Friday evening.

Co-coordinator Joy Neufeld says she is grateful for the tremendous community support over the years. “I am thankful that I can serve fellow community members a meal that we will all share with our families, and the family that meets here has become family, and we are family. It's a Thanksgiving dinner with family even though they are an acquaintance, but we are family here. This is an environment like you will have with your family and my neighbour will have with their family. It's Thanksgiving and we are family.”

Neufeld says they begin preparing the food several days in advance, and even have a youth group come out to help make meatballs and cut bread for stuffing for the traditional Thanksgiving dinner. “The Thanksgiving dinner will be served on the Tuesday after the long weekend, it's on a regular serving night. It's a very traditional meal, we'll have turkey, meatballs, vegetables, potatoes, stuffing, buns and a pumpkin pie or tart for dessert.”

Along with serving meals on Tuesday and Friday evening, the soup kitchen offers a breakfast and lunch program for school's in our community.

“We have a school lunch program where a resource teacher or principal will identify a student that may have an attention problem or a discipline problem and realize that a child that may not have had a lunch for a few days. We deliver school lunches or supplies on a daily basis. Sometimes a child comes with just an apple or a chocolate bar or a juice box, we hope we are able to help the children learn and to have a good lunch so they can have a good learning environment.”

Soup's On receives financial donations to support the lunch and breakfast program's. Neufeld says, “We also do a breakfast program, again teachers identify kids that come to school and are not learning well or have short attention spans or maybe even aggressive, so they give them a yogurt or granola bar to help them through the day.”

Neufeld says from the turkey's they serve to the butter for the buns, all of the food has been graciously donated by the people in our community. “The food comes from the generosity of the community and the people who know I've been doing this for a while. Most of the vegetables are from people's gardens, and the meal is totally donated by the community.”