Lunch program for flood volunteers ending Wednesday

After serving more than 52,000 lunches to thousands of flood recovery volunteers over the last two years, the Meet and Eat lunch program for AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers will serve its last meal this week.

“It just seemed like time,” said Joan Force, 55, who along with friend Deb Sedlacek started the program in August 2008. “When the flood groups were coming the numbers were there, but now there are only about 20 volunteers in town.”

The last meal for the Meet and Eat program will be at 11:30 a.m. Wednesday at First Presbyterian Church, 310 Fifth St. SE, in Cedar Rapids.

Force and Sedlacek were volunteering with a neighborhood summer lunch program at Imago Christi Church, 1700 B Ave. NE., after the Flood of 2008. They met some of the VISTA volunteers as they would come through the lunch line. When one volunteer stopped to thank them for the lunch, Force said she and Sedlacek talked with the volunteer and asked where they got their evening meal.

The volunteer told the women they rarely ate an evening meal; VISTA volunteers were paid a small stipend and they often skipped meals in order to save money.

“Gas was $4 a gallon, they weren't getting paid very much and many of the volunteers were having to drive around town, or even into town, to get to flood recovery sites,” Force said. “There just wasn't a lot of money.”

Knowing the meal program would end when school started - and that volunteers would very likely still be working in the area - Force and Sedlacek went to work to create a year-round lunch program to allow the volunteers to have at least one good meal each weekday. The two women funded the program themselves before receiving three $25,000 grants and various donations, including a $10,000 donation from First Presbyterian Church.

During its peak, Force said she and Sedlacek and a host of volunteers were serving between 100 and 150 meals a day. Now that the number of VISTA volunteers in Cedar Rapids has dropped off, so have the number of meals served. The work involved, however, hasn't changed.

“It's just time,” Force said. “It takes just as much work to serve 20 people as it does to feed 150. You still have to be here to get the food ready, to serve it.”

Volunteers have put in more than 14,500 hours staffing the lunch site, Force said.

“That's just a lot to keep asking people to do that,” she said.