This downtown lunch program serves the homeless and hungry. Its staff were once in diners' shoes
As head cook of Milwaukee’s only hot lunch program for the homeless and hungry, Lauren Baas spends most of her shift in the kitchen, preparing a meal for 100-plus people.
The kitchen is in the basement of a building in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist complex downtown, and guests dine in a room on the first floor. But she always finds time to dash upstairs and greet the diners.
Last Thursday, she was replenishing pans of spaghetti in the dining room of the Open Door Café when a young woman at a table spotted her.
“Miss Lauren,” called out Ashsai Webb, 23, a mother of one who is currently living in a tent. “I didn’t get my hug.”
Baas hugged her warmly. “How’re you doing, girl? I love your hair,” she told Webb, whose braids were dyed red and platinum blonde.
It’s those interactions that fuel Baas. She personally understands how isolating and challenging life on the margins can be. In the three months she’s cooked for the Open Door Café, she’s made a point to treat diners with dignity and compassion.
"When you are accepted and you're not looked down upon or treated differently, I think that means the most to the families," she said.
Baas still thinks about the moment a father came into the café with two little boys — an uncommon sight. She ran to a back room and found leftover care packages from Christmas with toys and basic necessities for the kids.
“I just do it so they know someone is there and does see them struggling,” she said.
Baas is one of the three paid staff at the café. Each has been touched by addiction, food insecurity or homelessness in their own lives. Together, they’re infusing new life into the long-running Catholic ministry.
The dining hall, closed for the COVID-19 pandemic, reopened a year and a half ago. And with Baas on staff, the café — open six days a week — went from serving hot lunch two days to four days. She hopes to bump it to five soon. Guests can choose to take away a bagged lunch any of the six days.
Cook trained in food pantry's workforce program sees position as a way to give back
The head cook position has given Baas, 36, a renewed direction in life. She is a mother of two children, ages 11 and 8, and is in recovery from a painkiller addiction.
Life has not been easy for Baas. When she was about 8 years old, her parents divorced and her father broke his back. Living with her dad, she found herself taking care of their home, cooking and cleaning. She and her father struggled to make ends meet on welfare, and she visited the Riverwest Food Pantry.
As a pregnant mother, Baas returned to the pantry — now called the Kinship Community Food Center — when she lost her job and needed to feed her family.
Later, when volunteering there, Kinship staff noticed Baas was sinking to "one of my lowest lows." A teen girl she had raised from a baby left Baas' home, her father died, and she began abusing painkillers as back pain from years of physically demanding jobs caught up to her.
"I was one step off being on the streets," she said.
Kinship staff offered her a spot in the center's workforce training program. There, she learned culinary and kitchen skills and found people who cared about her like family. It's that program that led her to the job at Open Door Café.
"They helped me see me for me again and have that confidence to be able to have a career," Baas said of Kinship staff.
The missions of both Kinship and the Open Door Café appealed to Baas, who since childhood has seen the value of feeding people. She loved the idea of "giving back and paying forward all the blessings I've been bestowed."
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Each week she gets creative, planning balanced meals with the donated food that appears in the kitchen freezers. On Thursday, she crumbled slices of donated meatloaf and mixed it with spaghetti and tomato sauce. She has about three hours each morning to turn out a meal for 80 to 130 diners. The crowd sizes fluctuate depending on the time of the weather and the time of the month.
Just before lunch is served each day, she takes a break to smoke a cigarette outside — it's a habit she's trying to break — and chats with the people lined up outside. "What are we having today, Cook?" they like to ask.
"I think they need a chance. Someone gave me a chance," Baas said. "I think everyone deserves a second chance. We're not defined by the worst thing we've done. There is hope that with hard work and determination, you can get to what you want to be."
The work is personal for staff who run lunch program
The food Open Door Café staff and volunteers serves fills a crucial gap in the diets of Milwaukee's homeless and hungry.
The lunchroom opens at 11:15 a.m. For many guests, it is the first meal they eat since the prior evening at St. Ben's Community Meal, a free dinner program of Capuchin Community Services also located downtown.
When Idalia Nieves-Reyes was hired about a year and a half ago, she was the only paid staff member. She was cooking as well as managing donations, volunteers and the dining room.
After a month, Jayson Vadnais arrived as a diner. He was homeless at the time, and he volunteered to help Nieves-Reyes run the lunch program. Eventually, she got the funding to hire him as a manager. Seeking recovery himself, he is briefly on leave.
Nieves-Reyes now oversees lunch operations as well as other social justice and outreach programs for the Family of Five Parishes, a group of downtown, east-side and Riverwest Catholic churches.
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For Nieves-Reyes, the work is personal. She became homeless at 15 years old in Puerto Rico when her family lost their house in a flood. All she had left was the pair of pajamas she wore. She also knows that her father, who lived in the U.S., was likely homeless as well.
When she first served food to the homeless as a volunteer at the St. Vincent de Paul meal program, "I saw my father there in one of the guys who came." It made her realize that was the work she wanted to do.
Like Baas, she cares about treating the lunch guests with dignity and respect. She understands what they're going through.
"I can be in your shoes, not because I read a story. It's because I lived it, I experienced that," she said.
Dedicated retirees have volunteered their time for years
The program also relies on roughly 40 volunteers each week to pack bag lunches, serve hot food and pour milk and coffee.
Thursday's volunteers included a group of four retired women Nieves-Reyes calls "The Holy Ladies." The devoted team has been helping every Thursday for years and formed a bond of friendship.
Former hospital social worker Nimmi Arora, who used to send patients to the Open Door Café, began volunteering 15 years ago. There's Judy Wick, with 13 years' experience, and Linda Carter, with 10. Retired cardiologist Kiran Sagar is the newest of the bunch, with six years under her belt.
Before lunch, the women packed dozens of baggies of corn flakes and raisins for diners to take with them.
Then they took their positions on the serving line: spaghetti and meat sauce; garlic rolls; mixed vegetables; canned peaches. Serving spoon in her hand, Arora looked out over the room. Her shift could feel rote at this point.
But to Arora and the rest of the crew, each person that comes through the line matters as a human being.
“I see God in everyone," she said. "Everybody has the same soul."
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: At Open Door Café lunch program for homeless, staff relate to diners
