After 10 years of service to the Habersham community and two years of not being able to serve meals in person, the Habersham County Chamber of Commerce joined the volunteers of the Cornelia Soup Kitchen to reopen their facility to the community once again.
Volunteers and chamber members came together Thursday morning to discuss the mission of the soup kitchen and cut the chamber’s ribbon to celebrate their doors opening once again.
“The mission is twofold,” said Christy Bowen, a volunteer with the Cornelia Soup Kitchen. “We’re meeting a physical need, people are hungry, and being able to serve them a nice warm meal meets one need. And then on the other hand, and this is why it’s been so exciting for us to open again, I feel like that need for connection is super important— being able to invite them [the community] back in, and say ‘I see you,” and ‘you’re important,’ and ‘we want to meet you where you are.'”
In the years the kitchen has been closed, the Cornelia Soup Kitchen, alongside the help of the chamber and Habersham community, has been able to make the upgrades they need to better serve their community.
Through fundraisers with the Habersham Chamber, generous equipment and labor donations and volunteer work, the soup kitchen is in the best shape it’s been in years to give to those in need. Donors helped the organization replace their broken floors, repaint their walls, and upgrade their kitchen. The community raised about $7,000 total for the nonprofit organization.
“That was sort of how the partnership formed,” Habersham Chamber of Commerce Marybeth Horton said. “Just us being able to use our social media and our membership base to help them get the word out about when their fundraising.”
The kitchen is managed by volunteers from five area churches, where they donate their time to make sure members of the community have access to a hot meal and someone to eat with. Shirley Dillard, a long-time volunteer and organizer for the Cornelia Soup Kitchen, says that their goal is to feed the hungry— regardless of who they are or what they’re experiencing.
“We realize that that’s very expanded,” Dillard says. “We have people there that might not be destitute, but if they come and eat with us, then they can afford to pay their bills. We also have people that come for the socialization, especially the elderly, people that are living by themselves.”
She says the volunteers at the soup kitchen want to provide a place for the community to feel cared for, and that’s why they make sure that everything they make to serve is the same food they’d serve their own families.
“We’re here [for them],” Dillard says. “We’ve said from the beginning that we want our food to be as good as what you serve at home, we want to serve them what we would serve our family.”
Dillard hopes that one day, they can offer to bring meals to people who don’t have the means to get to the soup kitchen. She says that the organization needs volunteers to continue to keep the soup kitchen running, and to offer more programs in the future to help even more community members.
She encourages anyone interested in volunteering to further their mission to contact her at (706) 499-2672, or email the soup kitchen at [email protected]. If you’d like to donate to support the Cornelia Soup Kitchen, you can do so through their website here.
