Hundreds of people typically pack Siloam Mission each Thanksgiving to chow down on a drop-in style turkey dinner, but this year that won’t be the case.
The mission is making adjustments to their holiday dinner plans next weekend, in an effort to steer clear of large gatherings in the area.
“We’re looking at really limiting the number of people inside the building, trying to maximize our ability to give people as close to that traditional Thanksgiving meal as possible through our front doors in the form of bagged meals,” said Luke Thiessen, the mission’s communications manager.
In conjunction with COVID-19 regulations, the amount of volunteers allowed in the kitchen at Siloam has been reduced from 24 to 10.
The mission is preparing to to serve more than 300 meals to go.
“We’ve had donations of take out containers specific to the type of meal we want to serve, so we have takeout containers where we can do turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing and all of those things. It should be kind of nice, but again its not what we wanted it to be and that’s disappointing,” Thiessen said.
A modified traditional dinner is still being offered, but will only be available to those staying overnight at the shelter.
Attendees won’t be allowed to bring their children like in previous years, and strict social distancing measures will be in place.
“They’re kind of in their own bubble and we’re able to monitor that group of people, so they’ll be able to enjoy a normal thanksgiving meal with all the fixings, we’re still prepping for that type of a meal. They’ll be able to do that inside while socially-distanced with this reduced capacity,” Thiessen said.
Even though Thanksgiving is still upon us, extra emphasis should be placed on helping shelters this winter with Siloam and other locations facing several additional challenges amid the pandemic, Thiessen added.
“We need to start giving out warm clothes because the temperature’s dropping. We need to get as many people into the shelter as we can safely and we’re going to have to be doing a lot of work to make sure we can provide for people in a safe way.”
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