It’s 11:45 a.m. and Our Daily Bread Community Kitchen volunteers prepare to serve lunch in the dining room of the First Baptist Church in downtown Athens. The menu for today consists of barbeque chicken, green beans, cornbread, apples and cupcakes with toy rings on the top. Patrick Howard is setting out cups of water for the guests. He’s already set up the tables, folded plastic utensils in napkins and retrieved the desserts from a small refrigerator a room down the hall.
At noon, a group of about 25 people file into a line in the dining room. Howard leads them in a prayer before beginning to hand out silverware. The Temptations’ song “My Girl” and other Motown songs play from a speaker in the corner as people start to go into the kitchen to receive their meal, some say “Hi” or “How are you?” to Howard as they go in.
For 30 years, Our Daily Bread Community Kitchen has served meals to those in need. Its new director Patrick Howard serves these meals while also adding a gentle kindness.
“So looking at different ways to add or enhance experience, we started playing music. To me, music is that universal thing, just like food brings people together,” Howard said. “We want people to come in and be comfortable, enjoy a meal and just be able to kind of just breathe and relax.”
Beyond just serving meals, Howard wants the kitchen to become a place where guests can learn things like financial literacy, get health checkups and attend job fairs. Howard has partnered with other community organizations like Piedmont Healthcare to meet the needs of the guests.
“I feel like one of the major missing factors is having a support system,” Howard said. “Where you’re being encouraged, you’re being directed, you’re being educated so you can move forward.”
Our Daily Bread Community Kitchen is not Howard’s first experience with helping the community, he is also a Neighborhood Leader with the Family Connection of Athens and Communities in Schools. He then started volunteering at Our Daily Bread and went from kitchen coordinator to interim director to ultimately the director.
“I was trying to figure out ways to get more dialed into the community and connected to the people [and] the city that I love and it started from there,” Howard said. “So I started helping out and it became a consistent thing.”
According to Feeding America’s food insecurity study in 2020, Athens-Clarke County has a 15% food insecurity rate. Food insecurity is the United States Department of Agriculture’s measurement of a lack of access to enough food to maintain a healthy lifestyle for members of a household.
Our Daily Bread Community Kitchen is one of the organizations that work to help people affected by food insecurity and serves about 85 to 95 meals a day. The kitchen serves breakfast Monday through Friday and lunch on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
The kitchen is overseen by Downtown Ministries, but relies on meal sponsors, donations and volunteers to run the kitchen. One volunteer, Doug Dillard, believes that Patrick is what makes the kitchen stronger and a deeper community.
“Patrick is fantastic,” Dillard said. “Because he’s had predecessors that I’ve worked with that did not have the vibe, did not have the excitement, did not have the music, did not have the passion, did not say as positive blessings as he does to build people up and he makes it a community.”
As lunch wraps up, Howard announces to the guests that they have leftovers if anyone would like a plate to-go. As he hands out the plates, he plays “Goodbye Song for Kids” by the Singing Walrus on Youtube. After the dining room is empty, he immediately starts to clean and get the kitchen shut down.
“Being able to give back is the main part for me,” Howard said. “It’s about the opportunity to be able to serve and to figure out how I can be used to help someone’s situation better.”