Now at Garnet, Manna Meal looks to buy property or lease long-term

A Charleston soup kitchen has a roof over its head again after serving meals outdoors from a food truck for most of November, but the former Garnet Career Center will likely not be a forever home for Manna Meal, leaders said Monday.

Amy Wolfe, Manna Meal’s executive director, said the non-profit’s next step will be to look for property to buy or a long-term lease.

“I think buying might be the better option because we have to have a commercial kitchen and the space that goes along with that — all the dry storage, area for a food pantry,” Wolfe said. “So that’s a unique ask. And we want to be centrally located so that people can get to us, which is challenging. But we know this is what we have to do for the longevity of the organization, and we take that very seriously.”

Manna Meal had been housed inside St. John’s Episcopal Church since it started there nearly 48 years ago. The organization stopped serving from the Quarrier Street church in mid-November in response in part to an incident during which a Manna Meal client was accused to have allegedly made a lunging motion toward a woman and child outside a nearby grade school.

On Saturday, Manna Meal began serving meals from a garage at the former Garnet Career Center, 422 Dickinson St. in Charleston. Wolfe said the organization is excited to start a new chapter there, and the clients have been grateful to be back inside away from the elements.

“We’ve already seen snow flurries, we’ve had some really cold days, some really cold, rainy days,” she said. “People were happy to be back inside, not just for their meal but for the sense of community that it provides.”

Ellen Mills Pauley, secretary of the board for The Garnet Foundation Inc. that owns the building, said the organization’s long term goal is to create a museum of the history of the building, which was a segregated school for Black students of Kanawha County before it was used for adult education.

“At this particular time, it was good for us and good for Manna Meal for us to house them for an undefined period,” she said. She added that she does not believe that Manna Meal’s management is to blame for the incidents that have occurred there recently.

“I think it is a problem that is epidemic in the United States today,” she said. “I would like to think that the folks who have frequent Manna Meal will be thrilled to have a new place to be, and it’s a little more open, it’s not near schools and grade schools and things like that. So I’m just hoping that everybody can get along and we can do well, and Manna Meal will prosper where they are while maybe looking to find a place of their own.”

Mills Pauley said the Garnet Foundation wants to lease out other parts of the building to other nonprofit organizations and businesses. With three floors and a basement, the building has lots of space, she said.

“We’d like to talk to anybody about coming in, and if they’re nonprofits, that’s good. If they’re not nonprofits, we can still talk to them,” she said. “We’ve got oodles of space. Beautiful, old oak, wood and trim and wood floors and … the stage of the auditorium was the original basketball court, and that balcony has the original tongue and groove flooring, bleacher-style seats — it’s just a phenomenal building.”

Around lunchtime Monday, clients of Manna Meal said they were glad to be inside for lunch. The weather was bad at times, said Michael Layne, who has relied on Manna Meal for years. He said serving meals outside under the interstate bridge had not been ideal.

“We already had rain and we actually had some snow, and really especially as the weather is getting worse it’s difficult to find a place out there on the pavement to sit down and eat,” Layne said. “And this one here, we’re out of the weather and we have some chairs and some tables and you can actually set the food and some other things down on them. That’s much better than being out there in the weather.”

Marc Kulansky, a resident of the Veterans Lifeway Center, said the Garnet space is great compared to being outside.

“This a great idea,” he said. “I mean the building’s not used, so what the hell. It’s good for us, we’re right around the corner at the homeless center.”

Being inside is an improvement to cold and rain outside, but serving meals in an automotive garage has its own challenges, Wolfe said. The facility has one bathroom with multiple stalls, and no kitchen. Along with its food truck, the organization is still using its commercial kitchen at St. Johns to prepare meals and to store food, she said.

[We] get it over here, serve and then turn back around and do it again for lunch,” Wolfe said. “It’s a lot logistically, but we are certainly committed to it. The one thing Manna Meal does really well is we’re able to pivot and adjust to make sure that we meet our mission, and I think that’s part of what Manna Meal prides itself on is our consistency, because we’ve never missed a meal since our inception.”

Manna Meal served 338 meals at Garnet Saturday in addition to the meals the food truck served on the West Side. One hundred of those meals were breakfast and the rest were lunch, Wolfe said. The number for breakfast is on par with the number the organization typically serves at the beginning of a month, she said.

It’s also an increase from the approximately 75 meals it served on a busy day from the food trucks downtown, she said.

“I believe it has a lot to do with the fact we could not provide a place for people to sit down.” she said of the decrease in people served from the food truck alone. “And so a lot of our elderly, although they depend on us, were choosing to not come because it was too difficult for them to stand and eat after they made their way here.”