This story by Cassandra Hemenway was first published in The Bridge on Sept. 23, 2025.
Ask anyone involved with Montpelier’s community lunches and you’ll likely hear as much about community as you will about the free food. Four days a week, the lunches feature generous portions of hearty food, always with a vegetarian option. Anyone can come eat, no questions asked. Takeout is available.
Amy, a guest at Trinity Church’s Sept. 10 lunch, sat with friends and bounced a baby on her lap. Amy said she was 50 days sober and just moved into an apartment. Before that, she’d been living outdoors for three years, she said. She comes to the meals almost every day they are available.
“I just come here and get lunch and enjoy the company of the community,” she said with a smile.
In a decades-long ministry to feed the hungry, the meals have rotated among five local churches, according to organizers. But that’s changing. Four of the churches — Trinity Church, Christ Episcopal Church, Bethany Church and the Unitarian Church of Montpelier — have combined to form a new organization called the Community Table. (The fifth, St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, is still serving lunches on Fridays but has not joined the coalition.)
The aim: to open the program up to people who may not feel aligned with a church but do feel aligned with feeding neighbors, said Jay Voorhees, coordinating pastor of the Trinity Methodist Church.
Becoming a separate organization will also allow the group to apply for federal nonprofit status and to bring organizers together for “cross-pollination,” said Nancy Reid, who volunteers on the Unitarian Church’s “Monday Team.” (Reid is also president of The Bridge’s board of directors.)
How the meals are organized is changing, but the lunches themselves are not. They are served Monday through Thursday at Trinity (at 131 Main Street), where doors open around 8:30 a.m. for coffee and light breakfast. Guests are welcome to hang out there or return for lunch, which starts at 11:30 a.m. Last winter, when meals were served at Christ Church, that three-hour window turned the place into an unofficial warming space for those who had nowhere else to go in the cold. Staff members from Good Samaritan Haven joined church volunteers to help out. It’s unclear what will happen in the winter of 2025 and 2026.
The evolution of how the free weekday meals are organized started with the COVID-19 pandemic, said Theresa Lever, who coordinates Bethany Church’s “Wednesday Team.”
Before COVID-19, Lever said, Bethany had big teams of volunteers, a crowd for lunch, and donations that totaled about $100 each week. “We were serving more than 100 people” per meal, she recalled. “It was people who needed that free meal, but it was also the workers who came from downtown. … The meter person would come on her break.”
Then COVID-19 hit. “Everything went outside,” Lever recalled. They and the other churches in town, which were all still offering lunches separately, switched to pre-made takeout.
Then came the disastrous July 2023 flood, which left most of downtown Montpelier underwater and left only Christ Church with a working kitchen. But Lever says the volunteers didn’t miss a beat. All five churches started cooking meals out of Christ Church, serving meals outside at first, then moving into the church’s community room for indoor dining.
The churches kept their independence, even as they pinch-hit for each other when, say, a volunteer cook had to move on. Each church had its own shelf in Christ Church’s refrigerator and closet-sized pantry, each procured its own food through donations and purchases, and each brought its own team to cook and serve: Unitarians on Mondays, Bethany on Tuesdays, Trinity on Wednesdays, Christ Church on Thursdays, and St. Augustine’s on Fridays.
Meanwhile, Trinity’s flood repairs included an 18-month process of rewiring and moving its electrical service panel up from the basement, which made the kitchen unusable. Repairs were finished in June 2025, about the same time organizers decided to coalesce as the Community Table. Now the four churches use Trinity only, and what had been an effort of separate churches is united.
Despite a wealth of volunteer hours — Monday cook Albert Sabatini estimates it takes volunteers about 576 hours to serve 80 to 100 meals four days a week — donations help. Stephanie Krauss, coordinator of the Community Table and a Trinity member, puts the cost per meal at about $3.55, more than twice what it was five years ago, and half again what it was last year.
Some financial donations come from community members. A $965 grant — the Community Table’s first — recently came in from Hunger Mountain Co-op.
Food donations come from the Just Basics, Inc. food pantry, the Vermont Food Bank (which also charges for some of its food), and Community Harvest of Central Vermont, Krauss said. Community members also donate baked goods and desserts to supplement the nutritious meals.
The Community Table is currently accepting donations through Christ Church, which has 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, until the group gets its own nonprofit designation. (Donations to the Community Table can be made out to Christ Church with “community lunch fund” on the memo line.) That should allow it to carry forward an already solid tradition many decades into the future, welcoming guests from all walks of life and continuing to strengthen the social fabric that makes up Montpelier.
Krauss said she doesn’t want to erase the fact that the churches have been serving the meals.
“But the story, to me, is there’s a new way this is happening, which was created by the flood,” she explained. “(We are trying) to open it up to the community more. It’s not just a church thing anymore.”
Gloria Alexander, who works at Another Way, said she eats at the community lunches most days.
Amid savory smells from the kitchen and the din of people chatting, Alexander said “It’s wonderful. It’s the community which I like. I think if I was well off, I would still enjoy coming here, because it’s the community, you know. It’s the sense of family that most people don’t really have.”
