Dedicated volunteers hand out sack lunches to those in need every Tuesday and Thursday from the doors of Grace’s Kitchen at St. Barnabas of the Valley.

Some who receive lunches eat in the Episcopal church courtyard, while others venture to the picnic tables on the church grounds. Unfortunately, no one gets to eat inside the soup kitchen — there just isn’t room.

Grace’s Kitchen handed out its first sack lunch on June 2, 1998. Every Tuesday and Thursday since then, volunteers from the Episcopal church have been making and handing out soup in the winter and sandwiches in the spring and summer.

The idea for a church soup kitchen was well-received by the parish when it was first suggested. Hoit. Sh vs realized that the facility was barely large enough to store the food needed for the charity service. The church choir was displaced from their practice room, and a refrigerator and a freezer were squeezed into the church to make room for soup kitchen supplies.

Sally Tompkins, interim coordinator of Grace’s Kitchen, said that the kitchen is looking to expand into a larger building to better serve the area.

"The main thing we need is a different building," she said. "We’re looking to make it go more community-wide. We need to get a broader base and make it go five days a week."

Tompkins said the success of the program has shown organizers the need for more facilities and volunteers.

"We don’t know what they do on the other days," she said. "If there are 50 people who get a lunch on Tuesday and Thursday, there’s probably people who need a lunch on Wednesday."

Several church families donate their time to making the Tuesday and Thursday lunches possible. Ginny Hill, a 10-year-old Cortez girl, said that she has enjoyed volunteering at the soup kitchen for two summers, along with her mom, Melody, and brother, Kevin.

"I like doing this," she said.

The idea for a relief kitchen was started when the church served a charity Thanksgiving dinner two years ago. Joanne Ward, the coordinator of the program who is currently on leave, suggested that the church start a full-time soup kitchen to feed those in need, and that got the ball rolling, Tompkins said.

"Joanne Ward is the one who spearheaded it. She’s done most of the cooking and the shopping," Tompkins said. "There are a lot of people who need to be named, though. The credit goes to a lot of people because it takes a lot of people to make it run."

The soup kitchen is funded through donations, primarily from the church. A collection is taken from the parish monthly. Recently St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Durango has given money, and several other organizations and businesses including Shell, Kiwanis Club, and the Anschutz-Rogers Foundation have also given through grants. The Anschutz-Rogers Foundation grant funded the start up of the kitchen and was written by one of Grace’s Kitchen’s founding members, Jody Star.