Staff from Penn Presbyterian Medical Center (PPMC) and throughout the Health System kept up their annual pre-Thanksgiving tradition of helping to make sure the adults and children staying in every one of the city’s homeless shelters and halfway houses – along with those living on the streets – had
a holiday dinner.
It was the “Great Family Gathering” on wheels, COVID style. If the people couldn’t come to a party, the volunteers would bring a bit of the party to them.
For 17 years until the pandemic, the Church of Christian Compassion in West Philadelphia threw a massive celebration with dining, dancing, and children’s activities on the Monday before Thanksgiving to bring the city’s homeless residents a bit of light at the holidays.
Penn Medicine began supporting the Great Family Gathering in 2014 by sending volunteers to help serve; the following year, it added a monetary sponsorship. These efforts are part of a mission to better serve our neighbors. In the past, the event largely attracted PPMC volunteers because the
venue was close to the hospital campus.
“They made the people in the shelters feel so welcome and so comfortable and made them feel like they were somebody. They could come and dance, and they could eat as much as they wanted to – they could come back for seconds and thirds,” said Darlene Mitchell, an operating room scheduler at PPMC who first volunteered in 2019.
COVID-19 paused the celebration but not the mission of serving the less fortunate with compassion. After organizing a small-scale delivery of meals to the shelters last year, the church expanded the mobile event this year and brought back an army of volunteers to box up catered meals and prepare gift bags for delivery throughout the city.
On a chilly Monday morning, Mitchell joined a festive assembly line of volunteers gathered inside a tent in front of the church to fill reusable canvas bags with face masks, hand sanitizer, gloves, and first-aid kits.
In the afternoon, Mitchell moved inside the church, where she and other volunteers, including occupational therapist Danielle Fishman, MOT, OTR/L, and physical therapist Roksolana Mykhlyk, DPT, OCS, counted out individual meals and put them into boxes for delivery. Each meal contained a plate of turkey, stuffing, veggies, macaroni and cheese, a dinner roll, and a slice of cake or pie. There were handwritten cards attached to each meal that provided words of encouragement and greetings for happy holidays.
“I’ll have Thanksgiving dinner with my family, but I thought it would be nice to package up food for those who don’t have access to healthy food and can’t be with family,” Fishman said.
By the end of the day, volunteers had delivered 1,700 dinners and gift bags to 36 shelters and halfway houses. A food truck provided free meals in the Kensington area to those living on the streets.
Sandra Campbell, a paralegal in the University of Pennsylvania Office of General Counsel and a member of the Church of Christian Compassion, has been assisting with the event – including recruiting volunteers from Penn – for 16 years.
“It means a lot to me to be able to help people in need,” Campbell said. “We’re hoping one day that we can do it again in person, as we are able to do so much more in person than mobile.”