The Beloved Community Project’s free monthly community meal had a holiday theme in December. Organizers report that ‘Lots of folks came by for some delicious food, festive music, good company and a surprise visit from the Grinch, [who] was unusually jolly and joined in the meal.” Pictured above are volunteers Kate Anderson Carrigan and Misty Gill. (Submitted photo)
A beloved and well-fed community
- Published: January 16, 2025
On the third Saturday of each month, there’s a kind of family meal at First Presbyterian Church. The Beloved Community Project, which hosts the free monthly meals, considers anyone who crosses the threshold to be family — come on out, no questions asked, and you’ll be fed.
“It’s like a big family dinner — it’s so fun, everybody’s happy, and folks look forward to it because they know they’ll see people they don’t normally see,” said Kate Anderson Carrigan, a Beloved Community Project volunteer who has helped coordinate the monthly meals for as long as they’ve been served.
“And when we say ‘beloved community’ — that’s something Martin Luther King talked about,” Anderson Carrigan added.
The “beloved community” was a concept to which King referred throughout his life — “Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives,” King wrote in a 1966 essay, “Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom.”
The concept of the “beloved community” was and is a vision of the world in which, according to The King Center in Atlanta, poverty, racism and militarism are eliminated, and “all people can share in the wealth of the earth.”
“MLK Day is coming up, and [King] was hell-bent on building good community,” Anderson Carrigan said. “So you’ll find his words on all our stuff.”
The Beloved Community Project, or BCP, has been a part of Yellow Springs for nearly a decade, with its first efforts toward community-building beginning in 2015 and getting into full swing by 2017; in July of 2018, the BCP was registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
For the first several years, the BCP was spearheaded by the Rev. Aaron Saari, who was then the pastor at First Presbyterian Church and a Martin Luther King Beloved Community Scholar at Dayton Theological Seminary. At the time, the nonprofit had a wide view for its work.
“It looked a little different in the beginning,” Anderson Carrigan said. “It was music, antiracism and social justice, as well as feeding people.”
Anderson Carrigan and villager Amanda Banaszak were responsible for introducing the idea of free community meals into the BCP mix, according to a 2017 News report — an element of BCP’s work that Saari referred to, at the time, as “the missing piece.”
Though Saari left First Presbyterian Church in 2019, BCP continued its work as a nondenominational nonprofit, and the free community meals went on — until the pandemic put them on hold in early 2020. They returned in 2023, and are still going strong each month.
“There’s always been a community meal of some kind in town — you know, ‘I’ve got some pots, you’ve got some food, let’s put on a show’ — and [BCP] was kind of coming around to what used to be,” Anderson Carrigan said. “We started looking into food insecurity here in town and said, ‘Let’s just do the work.’”
Each month, Anderson Carrigan said, there are around 40 or 50 folks who show up to the meals, which she added, BCP’s volunteers plan out about six months in advance. Vegetarian options are typically on offer, and often vegan options, too. And if there’s any food left over at the end of the meal, it goes home with folks who attended.
“Sometimes we have a lot of food left, and sometimes not a lot — doesn’t matter,” Anderson Carrigan said. “We pack it up and it goes.”
In addition to the meal itself, BCP also always has grocery items on offer during its monthly events, displayed on a table for those attending to choose from, as well as gift cards to grocery stores.
And the BCP’s work extends beyond the halls of First Presbyterian Church, too: For years, Anderson Carrigan has fed kids who come to the after-school open hours at the John Bryan Youth Center on Wednesdays — which she said the kids there have come to call “Burrito Wednesdays.”
“I’ve been making burritos for six or seven years, and I now have them all trained to love them and wait for the burritos,” she said with a laugh. “That was just a personal thing that I did and still do, but once BCP became a nonprofit, we rolled [‘Burrito Wednesdays’] in, because we could support it with donations.”
Another longtime program under the umbrella of BCP — and a longtime part of Anderson Carrigan’s community work — is the Share the Joy holiday gift program. Each December for more than 30 years, the YS Community Library has hosted a small tree with gift requests from local residents in need of assistance; local residents take the requests from the tree and fill them, returning the gifts to the library. All requesters and givers of gifts remain anonymous.
The BCP has also fielded and met requests for other needs over the years, including utility bills and rent — though Anderson Carrigan said that, since Outreach Specialist Florence Randolph was hired by the YS Police Department, Randolph has helped fulfill more and more of those requests.
“Florence and I work close together — like all of us doing this kind of work, of course,” Anderson Carrigan said. “We all work together.”
Working together, she said, includes scheduling the weekly meals on the third Saturday of each month — between the weeks when the local food pantry is open, on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, so that there’s “access to food every week.” She also noted that “Who’s Hungry?” free meal program, which takes place twice weekly, has been a “godsend” for some of the folks she knows around town.
“And the work that Paula [Hurwitz] is doing at the food pantry is phenomenal — this thing that started in Mary Ann Bebko’s garage, that’s now this highly organized, well-funded resource [at Central Chapel AME Church],” she said.
There’s another need, beyond the material ones that BCP addresses, that Anderson Carrigan said is at the forefront of the group’s work — a need explicitly addressed in its name.
“Community is so important — the socialization alone is enough for some folks [who come to the monthly meals],” she said. “I have people who live alone, some who come from Xenia and other places; we don’t care who you are or where you live — come on in, you know?”
She added that she’s recently been working to build relationships at Emerge Springs, the men’s recovery facility that opened in the village last year. A few folks from Emerge have attended the monthly meals — but Anderson Carrigan said she hopes to attract more folks to join the “family dinner” table.
“It takes time, of course, just like this whole thing took time,” she said. “But that’s community — it takes time.”
Anderson Carrigan said it’s also taken time to build a stable of regular volunteers to keep the BCP’s work going; there are now about 10 folks total, she said, who take turns facilitating the monthly meals. And thanks to a recent grant from the YS Community Foundation, the BCP has enough funding to keep its programs running for another year.
But her longstanding hope, she said, has been to add another meal each month to the BCP’s programming — something else that takes time, as well as funding, helping hands and, of course, folks to come out and enjoy meals together in community.
“It’s the trifecta — we need all of it,” she said. “I believe that what we do for each other is what we’re called to do.”
For more information on the Beloved Community Project, including how to volunteer and/or donate, email bcpyso@gmail.com.
The locally based Beloved Community Project offers a free community meal each month, typically on the third Saturday of the month, noon–2 p.m., at First Presbyterian Church. The next meal is Jan. 18. All are welcome to participate; there is no residency requirement.
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