Daily Bread Soup Kitchen New Home
As many of you know, in the Fall of 2014, we purchased the old Emerald City building at 116 N. First Street in Champaign. Since then we’ve worked with an architect to create the best, most efficient, (and cheapest) design for the new space. This hasn’t been easy. Someone once said something about “too many cooks...” Well, here at DBSK we have a lot of cooks, very good cooks--and these cooks had great ideas about what our new facility should look like.
Our new design gives us a wonderful working kitchen, ample storage space for all the food available from our generous community, room to increase our number of guests by a third, restrooms in the front of the building, and a big front window that brightens up the room. Best of all, in a new building we can serve a hot meal to our guests seven days a week. The exterior patio has been razed and this will be enclosed as our lobby/waiting area. The interior has been demolished and renovation is underway! We have begun ordering stainless steel, restaurant grade equipment, and big appliances, which will meet Dept. of Public Health Requirements.
To make this renovation happen, we needed to raise $300,000! And we reached our goal! Thanks to all who contributed. That’s a LOT of money!
Daily Bread is unique in that it runs entirely on volunteer labor. We pay NO salaries. We have no administrator, no paid fund-raiser, no bookkeeper, and no secretary. Volunteers do all those jobs. Because of this volunteer labor, we currently are able to do what we do (which is serve 153,000 meals a year to the hungry of Champaign-Urbana) on a budget of approximately $13,000 a month. We are able to serve 200 guests a hot meal and give them a sack lunch for dinner, for $100 a day in food costs. (We have other expenses such as rent, garbage, utilities, insurance, etc.) And we raise that money entirely through local donations and a few local grants. Many of you, most of you, donate to DBSK, and it’s your donations and the donations of many others that keep us going month after month.
Many people think of Champaign-Urbana as a sophisticated and affluent community and are unaware of the number of our neighbors who struggle with issues of food insecurity and hunger. According to the Eastern Illinois Foodbank, the poverty rate for Champaign County is 23.4%, third highest in the state of Illinois. There are many, many hungry men, women, and children in Champaign-Urbana whom we see every day. Daily Bread serves over 200 hot meals and hands out at least that many sack lunches each Monday through Friday. Because we are currently located at New Covenant Fellowship, which is unavailable to us on weekends, we serve sack lunches, soup, and coffee out of a mobile van on Saturday and Sunday. Hunger doesn’t go away on weekends, and bologna sandwiches aren’t terribly appealing on a cold, winter day or a sweltering, summer day. Our new home will allow us to feed our guests a hot nutritious meal seven days a week.
Please join us in our effort to ensure that Daily Bread Soup Kitchen prospers in our new permanent home.