Kiwanis Club of Adrian adjusts annual Thanksgiving dinner to delivery meal only this holiday

ADRIAN — Thanksgiving Day arrives this week and the official start to the holiday season is here.

With Thanksgiving 2023 making its appearance on Thursday, Nov. 23, traditions will be held by many including the Kiwanis Club of Adrian and its members.

For the 25th year — halfway to the 50-year mark — Thanksgiving Day meals will be prepared by Kiwanians, but this years' service will be without the dine-in portion of the community meal.

The Thanksgiving Day dinner is running only as a delivery event for 2023, Adrian Kiwanis leadership told The Daily Telegram.

The change in operations is because of staffing concerns and struggles with manpower pertaining to Kiwanis’ main partner in the Thanksgiving Day dinner Matt Hughes of Alpha Koney Island in Adrian.

According to Kiwanis leaders in new President Cary Carrico and past president Lynne Punnett, the sit-down portion of the meal is being eliminated for this year only due to the staffing struggles at Alpha Koney Island, which have greatly impacted Hughes’ involvement with the project for this year.

Hughes, along with Gary Lundy, a former vice president of the Kiwanis Club of Adrian, teamed up more than 20 years ago to start what has become an Adrian and a Lenawee County tradition each Thanksgiving. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the meal was reformatted as a drive-thru event. It returned to its normal structure in 2021.

In its first year, about 200 meals were served. The dinner has grown significantly since then, serving upwards of 850 meals at times between the dine-in and delivery methods.

When there has been a sit-down location for the holiday meal, it has been held since 2018 at Adrian Public Schools’ Drager Early Education Center. Prior to then, the holiday meals were served to any and all within the community at Alpha Koney Island near downtown Adrian, 422 N. Main St.

The local partnership between the Kiwanis Club of Adrian, Alpha Koney Island and Adrian Public Schools has been an annual standing event in the community that seeks to ensure no one is alone and hungry on Thanksgiving Day.

“Matt (Hughes) at Alpha (Koney Island) has been a great partner for Kiwanis to work with over the last 20 years,” Carrico said. “We wouldn’t be able to maintain this event if it weren’t for him and his resources.”

Several hundred meals will be trimmed down from this year’s production, Punnett said. Instead of preparing 700-800 meals, 400 turkey dinners will be prepared and delivered to those residents who have frequently received home-delivered meals in years past. These recipients are homebound community members and those who may not be able to attend other Thanksgiving meal events. Any potential leftovers from the dinner will be donated to Share the Warmth of Lenawee and its guests, Carrico added.

Meal delivery, which has been arranged in advance by former Kiwanis Club President Joe Williams — now Kiwanis’ treasurer — is available to residents of Maple Village, the Adrian Inn and Friendship Place. Residents of any of these locations who are interested in receiving a delivered Thanksgiving dinner from Kiwanis should contact their respective building manager, if they have not done so already.

“Due to several changes beyond our control, Kiwanis is not able to offer any in-person or meal pick-ups in 2023,” a news release from the Kiwanis Club of Adrian said. “We hope to bring those options back in the future. We recommend community members research other options prior to the holiday. There are several local in-person Thanksgiving meal options available to those in need.”

The 400 meals being prepared for Thanksgiving delivery are the full meals “just like before,” Punnett said. The spread of food consists of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls and pumpkin pie for dessert.

“It’s everything you would expect from a Thanksgiving dinner,” she said, noting that Kiwanis is still holding its yearly Thanksgiving meal tradition, but with a bit of a change in 2023.

Meal preparations will start Thanksgiving morning utilizing the kitchen/cafeteria space at Adrian High School. The food will be packaged and assembled that afternoon to ensure the meals are hot and ready to go when delivered to the recipients.

“You can do what you can with the resources you have,” Punnett said. “It’s not a money or funding sort of thing, it really is about human resources and staffing.”

From a personal perspective, Punnett said her family supports her being gone for a good part of Thanksgiving Day to help out with the meals. For Williams and his family, Punnett continued, their Thanksgiving Day each year is helping at Kiwanis’ dinner.

“We might not be sitting around a table cutting turkey together at home, but this is what we want to do for the holiday,” she said. “That’s what a service club is.”

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Carrico has been a member of the Kiwanis Club of Adrian for seven years. In October, he accepted the presidency gavel from Punnett.

When his children were younger, he said, his family was wholly involved with the meal preparation at Alpha Koney Island, and when the project moved over to Drager.

“It’s a cool event to be a part of,” he said. “The thing I have really enjoyed about it, is people get a sense of this is where they can come and eat a hot meal — not by themselves — but with other people around them providing conversation and fellowship. Since COVID, the numbers for the sit-down meal have declined. It’s a shame that we can’t have that option this year. The new good news is, we will still be able to do delivery.”

The Kiwanis Club of Adrian, which be found at adriankiwanis.org, is one of more than 7,000 worldwide clubs included in Kiwanis International. Kiwanis intentionally takes action to positively impact the Adrian community by supporting the development of youth and families, and supporting health, wellness and recreation.

The Thanksgiving Day dinner is one of the service club’s several community projects and fundraisers it hosts throughout the year. Especially during the holiday season, Kiwanis has a handful of other drives including a food basket mission with Associated Charities; a fundraising cheese sale held in October or November; a Christmas toy project that partners Kiwanis with the Salvation Army and Associated Charities of Lenawee; and Salvation Army bell ringing at various locations throughout the holidays.

— Contact reporter Brad Heineman at bheineman@lenconnect.com or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: twitter.com/LenaweeHeineman.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Adrian Kiwanis adjusts Thanksgiving dinner to delivery only this year