Martha’s Table marks 10th year of food and fellowship in community

September 3, 2014 · 0 Comments

By Brock Weir

10 years on, there’s still always room to pull up a chair at Martha’s Table.

When the stoves are flipped back on after the summer hiatus, the outreach group based out of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church on Mosley Street will mark a decade of providing food and fellowship to people in need throughout the community.

September marks the beginning of Martha’s Table’s 10th year which began after looking for ways to fill in service gaps from CHATS – Community and Home Assistance to Seniors.

“We thought maybe we could start something here,” explains long-time volunteer coordinator Helen Dawn. “We opened up the first day with no publicity or anything and we had 15 people here. Everything was fine. 15 or 20 people could be good, we thought, and then the next week we had 45! After that, we had 65 because word had gotten around the community.”

Since those early days, Martha’s Table has become a destination. Thursday mornings on Victoria Street are characterised by heavy on-street parking as a steady stream of people flow into the church hall looking for fresh food and friendship.

All of the work is done by volunteers, both inside and outside the church community, young and old, who always provide just enough elbow grease to make Martha’s Table a well-oiled machine, with a menu that changes each week based on donations, with homemade soup being one particular constant.
“Our original philosophy was we just wanted to feed the community who needed something to eat,” says Ms. Dawn. “If you are hungry, you don’t live well. If you don’t live well, you don’t add to the community. If we can feed you, then you’ll add to this community of Aurora.

“[Over the last 10 years it has gotten better because now there are more people interacting. We have people with whom we send food down at the end of the day. We will send food home with people who are really in need, which might be three or four days’ worth of food so they can survive. A lot of them are seniors. The pension doesn’t go as far as you think it does, especially if you are a single person. That is just where it is at – we want to feed people.”

This “we” can change from week to week, but more often than not Martha’s Table is manned by a familiar corps of men and women. Anyone is welcome to come in and lend a hand, says Ms. Dawn. They particularly value the connection Martha’s Table has with Holy Trinity School in Richmond Hill, which sends between eight and 10 student volunteers aged between 14 and 15 to support the group every other week.

The kids bring food, help make sandwiches, prepare the desserts, and do just about everything that needs to be done. Everything that is prepared is available to patrons for $4, if they can afford it. If they can’t, that is not a problem for Martha’s Table.

While the group relies on congregants to prepare their homemade soups, financial donations and revenue from meal tickets largely keep the operation afloat. Whatever is left over at the end of the day ultimately flows back into the community, says Ms. Dawn.

“We get whatever food we can buy, put that aside, pay for it, and whatever money is left over we give to Welcoming Arms, Yellow Brick House, the Canadian Mental Health Association, or wherever we feel there is a need or could help our people,” she says. “In our last full year from September to June, we gave approximately $4,900 to other charities around Aurora.

“The facilities here at the church are paid for by the church congregation and none of the money that comes through the door [goes to that]. There are people who pay, some who can afford to pay, and some who can’t afford to pay, and we just let it go at that, and [while] we do have to pay for the food there hasn’t been a week where we haven’t been able to cover the cost of food.”

When the crowd is cleared out after the weekly meal, Ms. Dawn says Martha’s Table measures their success by the number of people “laughing, talking, smiling, and not bringing soup back!” This fellowship, in turn, is something she says sustains them going forward, interacting, meeting friends they have not seen in a long time, and, in some cases, just getting out of the house.

“For the next 10 years we’re just going to be doing what we have been doing, make sure it keeps working, and make sure it keeps working the way it has been working!”