More than a thousand people benefitted from the generosity of The Salvation Army at the organization’s Thanksgiving Day dinner last week.
Scott McCloud, community relations coordinator for the Salvation Army, said, “This is our one day we open the doors to the community. We provide a complete Thanksgiving Day meal to the community. We offer walk-in meals, take-out meals and delivery meals. We were taking requests for our shut-ins weeks in advance to deliver them a meal. The total of all those together came out to be 1,015.”
According to McCloud 100 turkey breasts were used to serve the meals that day. Additionally, another 100 turkey breasts will be used for the Army’s holiday seniors’ food basket giveaway next week.
Part of the success of the annual holiday meal is the volunteers. “Everybody likes to volunteer,” McCloud said. “I had 145 volunteers, which, I believe, might be a new record because I didn’t turn anybody down. … We had everyone from seniors helping out to young kids that were wanting to do this.”
Among those volunteers lending a helping hand was Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins, who worked on the serving line.
McCloud said the Thanksgiving Day meal “is a wonderful opportunity for us to provide a service where someone is homebound or they’re by themselves. We also serve our shelter residents, who are right next to us, the Merkle Center of Hope. And it’s our opportunity to pretty much open our hearts and our love of food — of course, everybody likes food — to the community.”
He said the meal was “a wonderful success. We call it the community meal, the Thanksgiving Day Community Meal because it is our opportunity to open up our building.”
This Article was published in the December 6 issue of The Inquisitor