NORWAY — The Progress Center has a long history of providing free, nutritious food to all members of the Oxford Hills community in need. However, this year COVID-19 put at risk families and families that had never before experienced food insecurity, in impossible situations.

The Progress Center’s Community Kitchen team came together in early April to transform the community dinners and multiple food pantries to meet CDC guidelines for social distancing. With a plan in place and compassionate TPC employees and volunteers the team tackled the next hurdle; hungry kids.

The Progress Center made a commitment to the children in our community to ensure that any children in Oxford Hills that needed a healthy meal during the summer months could have one at no charge. We participated in a program called Summer Food Service Program that helps guide programs like us.

Operating out of TPC’s Norway location at 35 Cottage Street, the Community Kitchen and a various group of helpful and ready volunteers as well as TPC employees took on the great commitment to helping feed the food insecure in and around Oxford Hills. Following the CDC COVID-19 guidelines, our dedicated team worked to provide the community with extra support in an uncertain time.

For 9 weeks the Progress Center’s Community Kitchen worked to distribute 4 meals on Monday and 6 meals on Wednesday. With this set distribution in mind, the Progress Center’s Community Kitchen hoped to keep the bellies of those in need full of food until the next distribution date.

Over those 9 weeks, the Progress Center’s Community Kitchen team worked incredibly hard and served 10,700 breakfasts and lunches to those who were in need of healthy and sustainable meals during these troubling few months. To put the hard work, the TPC’s Community Kitchen team did into perspective, in 2019 the Community Kitchen put out 1,400 meals over an 8-week time frame.

Since the end of the meal distribution, TPC’s Community Kitchen has still kept up on doing great things for the community to help aid in food insecurity. The Community Kitchen team has continued their Community Dinners every Thursday, but instead of a sit down dinner, due to COVID-19, the Kitchen has created a drive up dinner. TPC’s Community Kitchen has also kept up a Meals on Wheels’ program for elderly members of Oxford Hills, as well as a Feel Better Food program for recent patients released from the hospital and their families fed.

To learn more about the Progress Center’s Community Kitchen, head to https://progresscentermaine.org/special-projects/community-kitchen/