Community Thanksgiving Meal 2007
Jonesboro, Arkansas

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Dedicated to the hundreds of volunteers from our community who make this work every year.

Final preparation of the food for the 2007 Jonesboro Community Thanksgiving meal begins in the early hours on Thanksgiving morning at churches all over the city.  When the food arrives at St. Bernard's Auditorium on Thanksgiving morn, it's placed in food warmers borrowed for the occasion. 

A new "Welcome" sign greeted volunteers and guests in 2007 ... who get counted and name-tagged when they arrive at St. Bernards Auditorium.
More than 900 meals were served this year. 

Most of the tables are in place by Thanksgiving morning, although a few were added in anticipation of a record turnout in 2007.

Volunteers map out the delivery strategy.  Familiarity with the streets of Jonesboro is a must for these folks. 
One Community Thanksgiving volunteer was a Jonesboro Fireman whose knowledge of the streets of Jonesboro helped tremendously. 
Phone calls for home delivered meals had been coming in to a local church for days prior to Thanksgiving, and a cell phone rings all morning at the home-delivery table, manned by volunteers.  They consult maps and their own individual knowledge of the city for the best delivery strategies.  Volunteers take an average of 3-4 meals on each trip.  About 600 meals were delivered by volunteers, including several meals to local hospital ICUs. 

Early morning preparation includes packing napkins, eating utensils, and a roll in a brown paper sack and putting dessert into individual dessert containers for home delivery.  The early arriving volunteers form an assembly line to take care of this step in the process.

Volunteers arrive all morning and all are given some job to do.  Representatives of the local news media show up for the annual event, and each gives its own individual slant on the activities.  [Click here to read the Sun story by Mark Randall; the KAIT story by Stan Morris is here; click on "Community Thanksgiving"].  All of the reporters are invited to sit down and share a meal since they are working on this holiday and have to be away from their families, too.  Live piano music fills the Auditorium during the meal.   

Face and hand painting is a popular activity again this year at the 2007 Jonesboro Community Thanksgiving meal. 

Churches and individuals provide pies and cakes for dessert.  The non-refrigerated items begin to arrive at St. Bernards Auditorium the afternoon before Thanksgiving Day and continue to trickle in during the morning.  Pies and cakes soon fill nearly half a dozen tables.  Volunteers deliver the late-arriving pies and cakes to the dessert-staging area, where other volunteers cut them into individual serving pieces and place them in small containers for home delivery or on dessert plates for those who will dine in-house. 

Inexplicably, volunteers begin arriving very early at St. Bernards Auditorium so that all of the preparation for home-delivered meals is completed in record time.  Volunteers get a chance to relax and enjoy visiting with each other before the food begins to arrive from area churches and the task of loading up plates for home delivery gets underway. 

Volunteers start going through the Thanksgiving food line about 10:30 a.m.  They are loading containers for those who have ordered meals delivered to their homes in Jonesboro.  As guests arrive at the Auditorium, volunteers take plates of traditional Thanksgiving fare -- turkey, dressing, giblet gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, and a roll -- to the tables which have been decorated by a troop of Girl Scouts.  Volunteers also deliver drinks and refills.  The volunteers range from adults to children ... including whole families who give up a large part of their Thanksgiving holiday to help someone else at this annual event, now in its 13th year. 

Clean up is the final task of the day.  There is very little leftover food, but the food that does remain is loaded into a truck for delivery to an area relief agency. 

Thanks to all who helped. We wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving!

 

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