Starting off with just a few people, the Peace Café now averages about 30 people at its food offerings, said Mollie Wilkie, coordinator at the café. It even draws as many as 50 people at times, she said.
Originally, the food came solely through Desert Harvest, a food rescue program that’s part of Adelante, she said.
“[Desert Harvest] finds organizations like grocery stores, restaurants and schools that have excess food, and lines them up with outreach programs that have need. We glean some from that,” Wilkie said.
Though the food from Desert Harvest is rarely enough, the community comes together to provide for the Peace Café, which began three years ago.
Wilkie, one of the original innovators of the project, said she views the Peace Café as the peaceful part of the Peace/Justice dynamic.
However, it always seems to work out, she said. People bring food, too, and there is enough. Wilkie said the café wouldn’t be nearly as successful if it weren’t for the involvement of the community.
Despite its endurance and growth hitherto, Wilkie said she wishes to see further growth. In an effort to broaden the horizons of the Peace Café, they have invited people to come and perform their individual talents and abilities, including a Healing Touch practitioner who, behind an oriental-style screen in the dining hall, attempts to soothe those in need.
Those volunteers who operate the Peace Café desire others to bring new talent to the place, she said. They’re looking for volunteer yoga instruction, guided meditations, and other types of spirit-lifting activities.
“People from a wide diversity come in and sit at this table. It’s a venue where people come and talk. It’s a place where they can communicate. It’s bringing people together. It’s community,” she said.
Susan Schuurman, a three-year coordinator for Albuquerque Center for Peace & Justice, said she has also seen the community come together to help make ends meet.
“Students come here and activists come here, and we thought they were going to plot the revolution, but what’s happened is food was available and now hungry folks started to come,” she said.
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Though it wasn’t planned as such, many homeless people began frequenting the Peace Café. It turned into a place where homeless and housed people could meet and mingle on equal terms.
Originally, Schuurman said she was disappointed by the influx of homeless people, many of whom were inebriated. She said she felt that the vision had been diminished because the people that began coming in were certainly not planning social justice or organizing anything.
However, her perspective was swayed when a group of philanthropists, stopped in from New Orleans, commented on their admiration for the welcoming atmosphere of the Peace Café.
Schuurman said according to them, they had been all over and had not found a place where people came together as they do at the Peace Café.
Mikey Harvell, a volunteer who has been working for Peace Café since its inception, said, “I think that (Wilkie’s) idea was to unite the people who were feeding with the people who were (being) fed, to bring us together. We feed ourselves.”
“We’re working toward a purpose. It makes me feel complete,” Harvell said.
Kevin Haaf is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
