Community volunteers gathered together in Alliance on Thanksgiving to provide meals for people in an effort to grow the sense of community.
Rahne and James Girard spearheaded People Helping People this year after leading it in 2022.
“James and I decided to take it over last year from the Boyles family,” Rahne said. “We kind of enjoyed doing it, so we decided to do it again this year. I know that David and Teresa (Boyles) have been doing it for probably 30 years. It’s kind of just grown over the years. I used to volunteer for it in high school and in college to help deliver meals and stuff.”
Rahne explained that the volunteers cooked a total of 46 turkeys this year, with leftovers being donated to Community Table.
“I think my estimate was that we served about 450; 275 were pickup, and about 150-175 were dine in,” said Rahne. “This is all run off of free-will donations, so, we’re paying for all of the food and stuff from the previous year’s donations, which is awesome. We couldn’t do it if people weren’t donating that way. We had great help from Harris Sales donate free rolls to us, and Grocery Kart gave us a rather large discount for us to have all that food. Pepsi donates beverages.
“From a volunteer standpoint, we had volunteers show up and help us Tuesday and Wednesday to help de-bone the turkeys once they were cooked. We had probably 20 volunteers those days. On Thursday, I had a handful of volunteers show up to help us start cooking the food early in the morning all the way to cleaning up,” Rahne said.
People Helping People did not do deliveries this year, Rahne explained, noting that deliveries were halted during COVID. She said that there were some exceptions to this, such as deliveries for the homebound.
“If we didn’t have the help, we couldn’t do it,” said Rahne. “We both want to put a big thank you out to everyone because we couldn’t do it alone. We enjoy doing it, and we love being able to serve this for the community. This is not just for low-income, or for poverty, this is a community dinner. This is for anybody who wants to come, if you are alone. It’s open to the whole community. We want this to be a fellowship, community-based dinner.”
People who are interested in helping out with People Helping People are encouraged to contact Rahne at 308-760-2028.
(Photos courtesy of Sherri Stoike)