A Full Plate

It’s 10:30 am, two hours before Friday’s lunch begins. But at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, it already looks like the ticket line on a blockbuster movie’s opening night.

A large crowd of women — many corralling squirrelly kids — has gathered inside, waiting, anticipating.

Evi Kohler, widowed, beset by doctor’s bills, and unable to work — barely able even to move — arrived at 9:30.

The first woman arrived at 8:30, wanting to be at the head of the line for the Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant meal. The first to arrive are the first to receive a ticket, the first to be seated at a table, and the first to go through Fresh Market Takeout.

“I come early to get in and get out and get to my other appointments,” Kohler says. “It’s a wonderful thing they’re doing here. I can’t say enough about it.”

The Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant, you see, isn’t just some soup kitchen. At one time it was, but it’s certainly not now.

“It’s a full-scale restaurant,“ volunteer and diner Bev Bohannon says. “We have the best cooks. We have the best restaurant in town.”

Diners largely have executive director Marlene Alford to thank for that.

“When this first started, the food wasn’t very high-quality,” board president Ann Harder says. “Marlene changed all that.”

After Alford partnered with an organization called Feed Spokane, diners have been able to eat not only donated bread from Albertsons but donated leftover prime rib from the Davenport Hotel.

Buffet lines are a thing of the past. Instead, servers bring a choice of entrées — today it’s a Chinese noodle dish, a dinner roll and cold strawberry soup — directly to diners.  

As with any nonprofit position, Alford has had to juggle roles. She’s been a grant-writer. A chef. A manager. A networker. A donation-solicitor. Occasionally, she’s a janitor. The other WCFR employees and volunteers rave about her in all of her roles. She’s a tireless worker, they say. A morale booster. She’s both a problem-finder and a problem solver. Alford, for her part, downplays her role, giving credit to the teamwork between dedicated volunteers, staff and local businesses.

Problem: The long line of waiting diners stretched outside, leaving them huddled in the cold and heat. Alford worked with St. Paul’s to create a regular waiting room — complete with benches — on the inside. When it’s hot, they pass out water and run fans.

Problem: When the poor are able to eat, they’re not always able to eat healthy food.

“So many of our diners don’t have access to the same nutrition education that we do,” Alford says. And fresh produce, Alford says, is expensive. 

So in 2007, as part of the Healthy Habits program, meals were redone with lower sodium and fat levels. WSU nursing students give health checks. Dieticians volunteered. Recipes and healthy ingredients are made available to diners.

Problem: Families who ate at WCFR were going hungry during the weekend. So Alford added a Friday Takeout Program. After their meal, diners file into a sprawling room — a sort of impromptu supermarket — chock-full of cereal, milk, yogurt, bananas, lettuce, artichokes and pasta. They fill out a shopping list checking off which categories of food they want for themselves and their children. (One of the most popular foods, Alford says, is broccoli.) Personal shoppers find the food and hand diners a few extra meals to tide them over.

Problem: Diners couldn’t afford the spices their take-home recipes called for.

“How can we expect people to cook something healthy if it doesn’t taste good?” Alford says. So she swung into action, surveyed 142 women, got a grant for spices (called the “Spice Project”), and began to give out small baggies of herbs and seasonings. The favorite, Alford says, is garlic powder. “That’s one of the biggest myths,” she says. “People assume that if you’re poor, you don’t care about how things taste.”

Alford’s always asking the diners questions to find more ways to improve. One suggestion inspired Alford to implement a kids’ menu. That way, children can eat homemade spaghetti and meatballs instead of stuffed peppers.

“Oh, every part of our program has changed,” Alford says. You can see the alterations in the fresh food, the hot meals, the raw numbers.

In 2000, the restaurant served 4,600 meals. Last year, they served more than 32,000. That totaled 273,000 pounds of food donated in 2008 — almost 38,000 pounds last June alone. Eventually, Alford hopes to add satellite locations to meet the demand.

For Alford, the growth of that number of people served by WCFR is double-edged. On one hand, that means more hungry mouths are being fed. But on the other hand, it means there are more hungry mouths.

So Alford has an odd goal for Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant: Serve fewer customers. Rather, have the need to serve fewer customers. “It would be great to see the need go away,” Alford says. “If our diners could provide and cook for their own families, they wouldn’t need our services.”

Women’s and Children’s Free Restaurant is always in the need of more volunteers and donations. For information, call 324-1995.