Dinners to Go program
Wyandotte — The Dinners to Go program at the clustered parishes of St. Elizabeth, St. Patrick and St. Joseph in Wyandotte feeds the hungry twice — first when parishioners and friends buy delicious, home-style meals at the parish kitchen and again when the proceeds go to charities that help feed area disadvantaged children.
Dinners to Go is the brainchild of Barbara Rickman, 74, head of St. Elizabeth’s Social Ministries Outreach. Her partner in the project is former St. Elizabeth Parish Council president and lifelong parishioner Sue Byrd, 60. The pair and their crew of volunteers call themselves the Happy Cookers.
“Sue and I had been talking about doing a fundraiser last August, and we didn’t know what to do,” recalled Rickman, a retired grocery store cashier/bookkeeper whose only cooking experience was for her family of four boys and for holiday gatherings at her home. “I was sitting at home one day and a little voice popped into my head that said ‘Dinners to Go.’ I got with my social ministry group, told them what happened and they agreed to go forward. Then we came up with the idea of using the funds raised to help feed hungry children.”
Since then, the Happy Cookers’ Dinners to Go project has raised more than $8,000 for charities dedicated to feeding hungry Downriver children.
“I didn’t know how successful it would be, but we’ve helped a lot of kids, and that was our goal,” Rickman said. “It just makes you feel so good to do something, especially for the kids that don’t have anything.”
Byrd, a financial analyst for General Motors, said, “This is a labor of love. I am as proud of what we do here as anything I’ve accomplished in my life. I feel a great sense of connectivity to the community.”
Dinners to Go are served at St. Elizabeth during the third weekend of each month. Preparation takes place on Friday, and the meals are distributed Saturday and Sunday after all Masses. A bake sale accompanies each take-out dinner weekend. Ten to 20 volunteers bring goodies for the bake sale each week. Other volunteers help to cook and pack the orders.
Dinners go for $7.50 and include a main course, a vegetable, salad, a roll or bread and dessert. Past meals have featured chicken paprikash with home-made dumplings, stuffed cabbage, kielbasa and sauerkraut or stuffed peppers, turkey shepherd’s pie, pork loin roast with scalloped potatoes, and lasagna.
Pam Bomba, office manager and bookkeeper for the St. Elizabeth/St. Patrick/St. Joseph cluster, suggested that the Dinners to Go program encamp at the St. Patrick kitchen last month to demonstrate the power of clustering. People at St. Patrick also chose the February beneficiary, the Downriver Food Pantry that the parish operates. Dinners to Go raised $1,100 for the food pantry last month.
“They started off thinking it would be a one-time thing where success might be 50 meals,” Bomba said. “Then when they cooked over 100 meals that first month, they knew they’d hit on something. Now, it’s serving the purpose of getting people to work together between the parishes, which is the purpose of clustering.”
The March Dinners to Go weekend will benefit children in need at two Wyandotte elementary schools over the Easter weekend. The 126 children enrolled in Garfield Elementary School’s Blessings in a Backpack program each will receive $10 gift cards to the nearby Shopper’s Valley grocery store. Blessings in a Backpack provides a backpack full of healthy food each Friday of the school year to help disadvantaged children and their families eat healthy over the weekend when school meals are not available. Ten families fromWashingtonElementary Schoolwill receive $100 gift cards to Shopper’s Valley that holiday weekend as well.
According to Bomba, who handles the finances for the Happy Cookers, the group averages 110 dinners each month. The low point was between 60 and 70 dinners at Christmas time.
