Over the past year, one of the high points for me each week has been the hour I spend early Wednesday mornings in the kitchen of Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Tulsa helping with basic food prep tasks for the Iron Gate soup kitchen. As Iron Gate Executive Director Connie Cronley wrote in this guest blog, Iron Gate is a 26-year old organization with a simple mission: To feed people. As a kitchen volunteer, I’ve known that the food I help prepare goes to the roughly 1,500 to 2,000 guests who receive a hot meal at Iron Gate each week. This past Tuesday, Election Day, I decided to finally spend a morning with those Iron Gate serves – and to take some notes for the blog .

I arrive at the Church at 8:30 just as a line-up of some 75-100 people is being led through the outside doors to the medium-sized dining room. Iron Gate actually serves two meals each morning: a breakfast at 8:30, followed by a lunch starting around 9:00 (on weekends they serve a single morning meal). The guests – as they are always called – eat well at Iron Gate. I am quickly put to work dishing out large helpings of  Cream of Wheat and biscuits for the first meal, which goes along with sausages and applesauce. Once the sausages run out, the second meal quickly materializes – chicken pot pie, a green salad, and a croissant, along with fruit salad and a donut for dessert. Their food comes from a variety of sources – baked goods and fresh produce from Reasor’s, canned goods from the Food Bank, meat and other supplies from donations. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Over the past eight months it has been my privilege to spend one hour a week doing food prep at Iron Gate, one of Tulsa’s largest and most active food assistance programs. I invited Connie Cronley,  Iron Gate’s Executive Director, to discuss their work.

Iron Gate is a soup kitchen and food pantry in downtown Tulsa. It was started 26 years ago by parishioners of Trinity Episcopal Church who made sandwiches for the downtown homeless. The food was handed out in the church’s cloister garden which had a decorative iron gate.

The word quickly spread: If you’re hungry, go to the church with the iron gate. The name stuck.

The organization is still located in the basement of Trinity, but it has grown into a separate 501 ( c ) (3) nonprofit organization.

Our mission is simple: We feed people. Read the rest of this entry »