'We're Not Done Yet,' Pastor Promises After Community Kitchen Closes

DOWNERS GROVE, IL — After serving more than 16,200 meals to Downers Grove residents in need, Community Kitchen in Downers Grove closed its doors on Nov. 12. The kitchen, which opened at First Congregational United Church of Christ during the start of the pandemic, shuttered due to safety concerns, Pastor Scott Oberle told Patch, but "we're not done yet," he promised.

Oberle said Community Kitchen was the brainchild of a group of five high schoolers who had been volunteering to help the church serve as a location for DuPage PADS clients. As such, the church had welcomed homeless residents every Monday for nearly 30 years, serving meals and offering laundry and shower services, along with a place to sleep.

Shortly after the pandemic started, DuPage PADS moved most of its clients into a hotel. Oberle said some PADS clients were unable to stay at the interim housing hotel, but the high school volunteers were still concerned about how these clients would get their meals.

As a result, they and their began making meals and driving out to deliver them to those in need throughout the community. Ultimately, the families met with church officials to talk about using their space to provide a more permanent central location for clients.

Thus, Community Kitchen was born in the spring of 2020. The kitchen was housed in the former Christian Science reading room at 1101 Curtiss St. and served breakfast and dinner 365 days a year, Oberle said. Often, as many as 20 to 25 people, including homeless residents and local senior citizens would come enjoy meals.

Recently, however, some newer clients began engaging in behavior that raised safety concerns for volunteers and neighbors.

"We did not feel as a volunteer organization that we were equipped to handle some of the things we were seeing from a handful of folks who had started coming to the kitchen," Oberle said.

He said people began spending time near the church, library and park, even when the facility was not open, which concerned some neighbors. Oberle said he believes mental illness may have been responsible for some of the incidents that came up.

He has since met with village officials and other churches to work on developing a new model to help give aid to food insecure residents. They plan to work with Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital and experts in mental health and deescalation techniques to train volunteers on how to handle crises when they arise.

Oberle said the goal is to rotate community kitchen services between local churches and provide a more consistent team of supervisors to aid volunteers, with the aim of relaunching in January of 2023.

“It will continue to be a community lift," Oberle said. "We’ll continue to join in that effort to care for folks with dignity and compassion and grace."

He told Patch he also wants to dispel some misconceptions residents may have about clients who came to the community kitchen. Oberle said some residents had raised concerns about clients coming from outside of the village to get access to free meals.

"It’s important for the community to know that 95 percent of the people we serve are from Downers Grove; they grew up here. I think that matters. They just might not have the same support or family connections that many of our other residents do."

"It’s easy to [dismiss] somebody as 'homeless' or 'on the street,' but every person has hopes and dreams and a story and they’re human beings," Oberle told Patch.

Oberle said he believes the mental health problems they encountered at Community Kitchen are something that is pervasive nationwide. He believes it is best to move forward with compassion, not fear.

"I think folks need our help not us to be afraid or push them away," Oberle said

“Acting first with compassion, trying first to stand in the shoes of someone who finds themselves without a house or without something to eat is where we should start," he said.

"And then we can figure out what we can do to help."