Volunteers at the DECC will provide over 6,000 Thanksgiving meals

Folks throughout the Northland are preparing for Thanksgiving meals tomorrow. Inflation has impacted the price of groceries, causing many families to change their plans for a Thanksgiving dinner. Many residents in Duluth and Superior plan on heading down to the DECC tomorrow for a free community meal.

More than 7000 volunteers from the College of St. Scholastica are hosting the 35th Annual Twin Ports Thanksgiving Buffet. It’s difficult providing that classic turkey dinner with all the fixings with current prices.

Although inflation is impacting everyone this thanksgiving, free thanksgiving meals are still being offered this year, thanks to donations and help from volunteers. Families in Duluth and Superior are ready for the 35th Annual Twin Ports Thanksgiving buffet dinner.

Monica Hendrickson has been organizing the twin ports thanksgiving dinner for the past 10 years. She says because of the higher costs of food from inflation, they need to start fundraising earlier in the year, because their expenses have increased to tens of thousands of dollars.

“So our food bill is almost twenty thousand dollars, a big part of that is turkey,” Hendrickson said. “Then we get probably anywhere between five to eight thousand dollars of donated product as well.”

The volunteers are ahead of schedule and have prepared well over 6,000 Turkey dinners. But even with the current inflation rates, there’s still hope that no one goes home hungry this thanksgiving.

“We had a lot of community partners that donated product to keep our expenses down. We’ve gone through a lot of our reserves at the college,” Hendrickson said. “So now it’s time to kind of build those reserves up. We went through them during COVID. We all know everyone’s grocery bills are going up this year. It was no different from for us.”

From the turkey, to the mashed potatoes, to bread rolls, preparing for a thanksgiving dinner is not only time consuming, it’s expensive. The average cost of a thanksgiving dinner is over $65 according to a survey from the Minnesota Farmers Bureau.

The Thanksgiving dinner down at the DECC is free and open to the public from 11am-3pm. Donations are encouraged to continue providing residents in the twin ports that full thanksgiving meal every year.

The 35th Twin Ports Region Thanksgiving day buffet have both long-time volunteers and newcomers. Andy Waldbillig is a longtime volunteers, and he says making sure people are well fed is the whole point of Thanksgiving. Layla Ward is a first time volunteer, but she plans on having her friends help out next year.

“The food that we’re dishing up, it looks spectacular, smells great,” Waldbillig said. “I can only imagine what it’s like, coming down to the DECC and eating a nice, hot Thanksgiving meal.”

“This is actually the first time I’ve ever volunteered. I’m pretty new to this, but I feel like I’m catching on pretty quick,” Ward said. “I would say that it is a very welcoming place, and I really hope that I get to come back next year.”

If there are any leftover meals, they will be given to Second Harvest Northland the day after Thanksgiving and re-distributed to people in need.