Soup for the Soul: A Christmas Cuisine, a community dinner established in 2001 by two Prescott-area youth, is celebrating its 10th year of bringing people together for a hearty meal during the holidays.
Soup for the Soul was started a decade ago by organizers Kaitlynn Dodge and Mackenzie Eaton in Prescott, Ontario, to ensure that everyone in the Seaway community had access to a good meal during the Christmas holidays and to bring together the local community at a free event.
Dodge explained the origins of Soup for the Soul to Ottawa Life: “Mackenzie and I aren’t social workers, but rather were young people who wanted to make a difference in our community. We both worked at Giant Tiger and saw a lot of people coming in around Christmastime, counting their pennies to make ends meet. We realized that there may be a lot of people in the community who wouldn’t get a hearty meal during the holidays and so we decided to do something about it.
“With that said, we wanted to make sure that it was a dinner for everyone – not just a ‘soup kitchen’ – so we invited all members of the community to come together for a meal. It serves the need for people who are hungry and could do with a good meal, but it also brings together people who want to feel like they are part of a community. This was very important to us – bringing together people from diverse groups within the community.”
For their role in initiating Soup for the Soul, Dodge and Eaton were awarded the Ontario Community Newspaper Association (OCNA) Ontario Junior Citizen Award and the Prescott Chamber of Commerce Connie Dickie Youth of the Year Award. (Both honours were given in 2003.)
Soup for the Soul was handed over to students at South Grenville District High School (SGDHS) when Dodge and Eaton left for university in 2004. Since then, Marla Campeau, a teacher at SGDHS, has managed the project’s succession to two new high-school students each year.
Numbers for the dinner have grown from 150 participants in 2001 to 620 in 2010. To date, about 400 of Prescott’s youth have volunteered to serve over 4,000 meals to residents of the town on the St. Lawrence Seaway 48 miles south of Ottawa.
Organizers hope to raise $5,000 through personal and corporate donations in 2011 to celebrate the dinner’s 10th anniversary and to ensure that Soup for the Soul will be available to the Prescott community for years to come.
For more information, contact Kaitlynn Dodge at 613.925.4665 or 416.835.0257.
