Around The Table Closes After 36 Years Of Serving People In Need
After 36 years of serving the Falmouth community with hot meals and camaraderie, Around The Table will not be reopening.
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to shut down last March, Around The Table followed suit and took a hiatus. But after spending more than a year trying to recruit enough volunteers to reopen, the board of directors made the decision to close Around The Table for good.
“I am really sad to have to close; I really loved working at the soup kitchen,” said Gerry Lynn Galati, president of the board.
Ms. Galati, who took over as president after her predecessor Celine Holly’s death in 2014, said the board has spent the better part of the past year and a half trying to recruit enough volunteers to finally reopen.
“A lot of our volunteers were [in their] 80s, 90s, late 70s,” Ms. Galati said. “So when COVID hit, a lot of them are parents and their kids and spouses were saying ‘no, you can’t go back to work,’ because everybody’s afraid of getting COVID. As things opened over the year—and we tried three or four times to reopen—we never could get enough volunteers to open at all. You can’t open a shift with nobody and you can’t work with just one person and serve people, it just doesn’t work. You need people with commitment.”
For more than three decades, Around The Table had operated out of the St. Barnabas Church Hall, where it served up hot full-course meals three days a week to anyone in need, no questions asked. Meals always consisted of meat, starch, vegetable, fruit, dessert and drink, in addition to coffee and tea. Pastries were available for guests to snack on when they arrived. Around The Table would also periodically provide its guests with gift cards to Windfall Market and Subway, enabling them to get meals on the days that Around The Table was not open.
“In some ways, it perhaps has been one of Falmouth’s best-kept secrets, although individuals desirous of a scrumptious, hot, multicourse meal were very familiar with it,” said the Reverend William H. Mebane Jr., pastor of St. Barnabas Church. “It is going to be a major loss to those individuals, particularly who depended on Around The Table for a healthy, hearty meal during the week. Frankly, I’m not sure what their alternatives are.”
Established in 1985, Around The Table started out as a committee of staff members from the Falmouth Service Center. At the helm was Colina C. Cummings, the organization’s first president, and Peter D. Kerwin, director of Falmouth Human Services. During its first few years, Around the Table was located at the National Guard Armory on Jones Road in Falmouth. In March 1987 it relocated to the St. Barnabas church hall, where it remained for the next 30 years.
“St. Barnabas has been wonderful to us over the years, letting us use the church hall for free,” Ms. Galati said. “And it’s been a year and a half. I couldn’t have them hold those days for us that we weren’t going to use. So basically, we’re shutting down because we don’t have the help.”
This isn’t the first time Around The Table has struggled to maintain its staff of volunteers. Back in October 1988, the organization was desperate for extra hands and published a call for volunteers in The Enterprise. In the article, Ms. Cummings asked for 20 volunteers to help the soup kitchen, just three years old at the time, stay afloat.
“If we don’t get more interest, we’ll be forced to close,” she said.
Seven days after that, another story ran in The Enterprise: more than 40 people had turned up the advertised meeting for new volunteers, surpassing the organizers’ expectations and affirming their belief that the work that they were doing was invaluable to the Falmouth community.
Now, three decades after those initial worries arose, Ms. Cummings’ fear from 1988 has come true: Around The Table was finally forced to close its doors.
In a letter to the Falmouth community, Ms. Galati, who works full time as a graphic designer at Lujean Printing Company in Cotuit, thanked the many local organizations and businesses that helped make Around The Table possible.
“All of this was made possible due to tremendous community support,” she wrote. “Without that support and the support of our volunteers who gave generously of their time to prepare and serve meals, we would not have been able to do this.”
For Ms. Galati, the closure of Around The Table signifies a much bigger loss to the community than just a place to get a good meal—it represents the loss of a community, something that once connected people and forged friendships.
“I sorely miss seeing the people that used to come in, and cooking the meals and helping people,” Ms. Galati said. “But there’s not much I can do if I don’t have volunteers to do it with.”
Although the board’s attempts to recruit volunteers during the past year and a half have been mostly fruitless, Mr. Mebane has not given up on Around The Table just yet.
“My hope is that it will be reborn,” he said. “I’ve made Gerry aware that if they can find a way to launch the program again and to have the volunteers needed to sustain the program, Around The Table will always have a home here at St. Barnabas. I’m holding out some hope, though I’m not very encouraged right now.”