Old firehouse is new home for Albany soup kitchen

Since 1988, Rita and Bob Berberich had the same Tuesday routine: pulling into a parking space near the St. John/St. Ann's Outreach Center in downtown Albany and entering a former convent to serve meals at the Welcome Table, the parish's soup kitchen.

That routine changed slightly a few weeks ago. The center is now across the street in an old firehouse that was purchased by the parish and converted into a multi-room outreach mecca.

The new center has a food pantry, waiting area, intake office, clothes closet, commercial kitchen and dining room.

Tight space

Previously, volunteers gathered in the convent's cramped kitchen to use a single residential oven/stove combo and tiny convection oven to prepare meals for more than 100 guests who were served at round tables in low-ceilinged basement rooms.

"You could never cook enough stuff," said Bruce Doud, finance manager at the parish. "The stove was very marginal. You were scrambling to make it all work. The roof leaked sometimes."

The volunteers, many of them elderly, had to haul pallets of food down a snug set of stairs and back up again. It was a "hardship" for people who "weren't all that stable on their feet," according to Mrs. Berberich.

New digs

Instead of constructing a new building to meet its needs, the parish bought the firehouse with parish savings and help from an anonymous donor.

After nine months of renovations, the new Outreach Center was dedicated last month at a ceremony presided over by Bishop Howard J. Hubbard.

Where firemen once slept, guests now eat on lace tablecloths. Chandeliers hang from beamed ceilings. A vase of yellow flowers compliments bottles of catsup and Louisiana hot sauce. Volunteers say they have doubled the number of tables.

Full house

Sister Barbara Quinn, RSM, the Outreach Center's director, estimates that hundreds of people will be served in the new building, thanks to its larger capacity.

Many of the Welcome Table volunteers have been serving for a long time. Pat Malloy, for example, has been coming since 1993; she is a member of Corpus Christi parish in Round Lake.

"This has a lot of meaning for us," she said. "You're doing something good, something meaningful. They're guests in our home. We will treat them as guests. And if they want seconds, they can have seconds."

"It makes me feel good to do some good down here," echoed fellow parishioner Cindy Racette.

Aiding the hungry

St. John/St. Ann's Outreach Center also runs a food pantry, which distributes three days' worth of food to more than 500 families once a month; a furniture program that helps clients locate beds, dressers, dining-room sets and other household items; and a food-delivery service for shut-ins.

Pat Tobin, who helps pack the delivery service, said that she and fellow volunteer Connie Alston "have it down to a science. We may be doing some good [for other people], but we get a lot more out of it" in return. The two are members of St. Pius X Church in Loudonville.

Mrs. Berberich keeps coming back as a volunteer because of the Center's "positivity in the face of poverty. [The new building] is certainly a model for other communities. They turned what could have been a liability to the neighborhood to something good."

"They're a great group of women and men," Sister Barbara said of the volunteers. "If I didn't have my volunteers, I don't know what I'd do. We hope to continue doing the Welcome Table and serving the people in the neighborhood -- except in a better space."

(Volunteers from a number of Catholic parishes in the Albany Diocese take turns serving at the Welcome Table. Other volunteers are individuals who donate their time. For information, call 472-9091.)

(5/25/06) [[In-content Ad]]