by David Mendez

All are welcome, all are fed, all are loved.

By themselves, the motto of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church are a balm on the soul in a world where uncertainty looms around every corner. But, every Tuesday, St. Dunstan’s evening feast hopes to be a harbor for folks who otherwise feel unmoored.

Each week, the volunteers of St. Dunstan’s set out to feed and care for more than 600 people with in-house meals, takeout boxes and care deliveries to tent cities across the North End.

The St. Dunstan’s food ministry has been in service to the community of Shoreline and Seattle’s North End since 2012, when a parishioner asked if he could use the church’s kitchen to make a meal for folks in the tent cities every few weeks. It’s only grown from there. 

Chris Johns has been volunteering with the feeding ministry for about 10 years, and he’s one of the folks leading the charge each Tuesday.

A pilot and flight instructor, Johns is a man with an eye for details and process. On Tuesday, when a volunteer who usually helps set the tables with placemats and flatware was running late, he and another person jumped in to get the job done. And when he wasn’t slinging napkins, he was pushing carts, throwing trash and checking to see what else needed to get done for the evening’s guests — a number that he cautioned might go up, as economic uncertainty begins squeezing households around the community.

“We had about two weeks of 85 people [in-house], and now we’re starting to climb again,” he said. “That climb could be due to the pinch of the government shutdown.”

The shutdown doesn’t just affect the pocketbooks of federal workers, but also people who are reliant on federal food benefits, like SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps — and WIC — or Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which is for low-income pregnant or breastfeeding people and children under the age of five.

“We were typically doing 75 to 85 people in house every Tuesday, but our clientele began to increase because of the reputation of our food,” Johns told The Osprey. “A few weeks ago, we had 120, 125 people. They can’t all fit in our parish hall at once, but they come between 5 and 6:30 and fill in empty places.”

He attributed the increase to Sabrina Connaughton, who began volunteering to cook with St. Dunstan’s in January. She’s made a handful of friends and solid connections in the local fight against food scarcity, and she was recommended to St. Dunstan’s to help out after the previous cook had to step away after surgery.

Connaughton’s background is in good causes — social work and rescuing horses among them — and a bit of cooking at local grocery stores, to recover from the emotional burnout and trauma of animal rescue. Cooking was a gig that gave her a chance to get out of the house, make an honest living and then come home without thinking about work. Then COVID hit. She got sick, then went housebound for a while.

She got back into cooking after helping out at a memorial picnic for Jane Kim, whose foundation benefits unhoused folks and people facing housing insecurity. Soon after, Connaughton began volunteering with NEST Mission in Lynnwood, where meals are served at the Lynnwood Hygiene Center, which led to connecting with Annie’s Community Kitchen, in Edmonds.

She began to feel a bit of burnout with NEST (“I was cooking for almost 1,000 people a week, and it became too much,” she said,) and a friend at Annie’s said that St. Dunstan’s needed a cook. So she stepped in to help run the kitchen.

The morning of a St. Dunstan’s food program begins with a look at the day’s spoils. The food each day arrives through gleaning from local grocery stores, with the support of Food Lifeline, which facilitates the connection between grocery stores and its partner programs like St. Dunstan’s. What comes through is always a surprise, Connaughton said. “It’s like those Food Network challenge shows,” she said — Iron Chef for a good cause, one might say.

She laughs. “It’s definitely not boring,” she says.

From the day’s gleaning, she tries to come up with three or four protein options, as well as a vegan protein source. Then she and the squad of cooks working alongside her — usually about three to four other people are in the kitchen with Sabrina at any time, with others sneaking through to grab supplies — then help build out the menu she’s designed.

A recent week saw trays of chicken, a simmering pan of tofu curry, stews of lentils and meat, and giant bowls of salad. All told, the evening feast will have about nine hot buffet trays, as well as bowls of salad and trays of plated desserts.

And it’s not just about formulating a menu from the proverbial basket ingredients, but preparing the food in such a way that it’s possible and easy to eat for folks with all sorts of needs. “I have to figure out how to make things tender enough, to make sure they’re in small pieces…and we’re allergy aware,” she adds. Potential allergens are announced to the food hall right before serving, and all food prepared with peanuts and peanut butter is made outside the kitchen. ”We’re responsible for other people’s health as well,” Connaughton said.

St. Dunstan’s hums with activity in the hours before the food ministry begins. The kitchen, of course, is the center of activity. But drivers are busy with carts and trays of food, packing up insulated Cambro food boxes and filling up truck beds and cabs with meals destined for camps in Lake City, or across the Ballard Bridge in Lower Queen Anne. Folks with free hands put themselves to work by setting places at each of the 90 seats in the dining hall. Still others are preparing desserts for to-go boxes and to be served that evening.

One volunteer, a woman named Lori who declined to share her last name, made sure that the camps with kids had extra desserts packed into their boxes. “To make sure the kids have something nice for them,” she said, in the midst of plating about 115 desserts.

Lori’s been volunteering at St. Dunstan’s for about 12 years, persisting even after Long COVID symptoms made the work a bit more difficult. “The Lord gives me what I can handle, and I’m proud of being here,” she said.

This volunteerism brings humility and perspective, Lori said. She’s watched as people have come to the evening meals to get food for themselves or their kids, giving themselves a bit more slack to stretch out their own means. 

“We have a number of volunteers who are needy themselves. And it’s surprising how many we have who aren’t members of the church, but are people in need who want to help out,” Chris Johns said. One benefit, he said, is that volunteers get a chance to pick out what they might need from the free groceries that are set-aside for any guests to dinner that day — at least, after Connaughton has taken her pick for the night’s dinner. Volunteers will prep bags for other folks who have helped and are on their way out — or even try to hand a dessert to a journalist that just keeps hanging around.

Like any community, folks will butt heads or bicker for a moment before cooling back down and getting to work. While everyone has their own reasons for coming in, the mission is the same: getting a meal ready for hundreds of folks all across the North End.

“Who knows when people are going to get their benefits,” Connaughton said, adding that food banks are feeling a lot of stress right now, and that other food programs are seeing higher numbers than she’s ever seen.

About 8.3% of King County residents and 8.8% of Snohomish County residents receive SNAP benefits. And though federal judges have ordered the Trump administration to restart fully funding SNAP payments that have been paused during the federal shutdown, the White House has pressed to stay the ruling. (As of this writing, a federal appeals court Friday afternoon denied Trump’s bid to halt fully funding SNAP benefits.)

“It’s hard to buy good quality food on a budget. You can buy the crappy mac and cheese, but if you’re trying to buy organic or the diapers that don’t irritate your child, it’s expensive,” Connaughton said. “It’s expensive. It’s all expensive. Good nutrition costs money.”

And so St. Dunstan’s operates their weekly program to make sure folks get what they need, whether it’s a hot meal or some goods pulled from the food bank that’s laid out each week. Friends from partner organizations brought stacks of socks and other clothing that folks might need. St. Dunstan’s ministry also takes clean clothing, coats and sleeping bags, as well as other goods. Any money donated to the program helps keep the kitchen running and well-maintained.

As the morning turned into afternoon, folks came in to set down their bags, grab a seat to sit and stretch out and get a spot of lunch. No one bats an eye. All are welcome.

“We feed anyone, no matter their faith,” said Lori, as she continued to plate eclairs onto a tray for the evening.

“All are fed,” said John, a volunteer standing across the table from her, as he prepared other boxes.

Quietly, the folks around that table repeated the final phrase in St. Dunstan’s motto to themselves. It didn’t need to be said. It was in their work.