Volunteers Prepare 500 Meals For Thanksgiving Feed

The mouth-watering aroma of turkey was billowing out of this afternoon, where about a dozen volunteers worked excitedly to prepare for the biggest Thanksgiving feed in town.

Eileen Richardson, President of the Downtown Streets Team, which organizes the feed alongside InnVision, said it takes hundreds of people to put together a meal that has become an important annual tradition for the nearly 500 predominantly homeless people served.

Richardson has for six years has helped organize the InnVision Estelle Chaflin Community Dinner. Champs, the former owner of Captain Cosmos, created it 28 years ago and originally fed 30 people.

Richardson now says it is something she absolutely has to do, especially after some feedback she received from a very thankful homeless man, who stopped her one day at the Opportunity Center.

“I was walking by him and he said, hey, are you the Thanksgiving lady?” said Richardson. “And I said yes, I am. And he said, I want you to know that’ s the best meal I had all year.”

That was in August, more than nine months after the dinner.

“That’s when I thought to myself, we can’t not do this. We have to do this every year,” she said.

The meal, which will be served both Thursday and Friday, includes 28 turkeys, 200 pounds of mashed potatoes, five crates of green beans, 22 massive trays of sweet potatoes with butter and brown sugar, not to mention the obligatory dinner rolls, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie.

“It’s the best meal a lot of these guys gets all year,” said Richardson.

Palo Alto Mayor Sid Espinosa, who was carving turkeys in the kitchen this afternoon, said he has been helping prepare this meal for several years.

“This is a community that people mistakenly think is only filled with people with a lot of money and resources,” said Espinosa, “and we have a lot of people in this community of need, a lot who have been hit hard by the economic downturn, and this is a great program. It’s good to support.”

Matt Bahls, who is Vice-Chair of InnVision's Board of Directors, said the annual Thanksgiving meal is particularly special for his organization, which feeds the homeless every day of the year.

“This meal—it’s a time of giving back, so it’s wonderful that we have so many people coming out and volunteering,” he said.

The meal is open to everyone, and will be served between 12:00p.m. and 2 p.m. Thursday, and 11:30a.m. and 1p.m. Friday at All Saints Cathedral in downtown Palo Alto.