MUNCIE, IN — Only a few weeks after taking over as executive director, Emily Hayes said she still isn’t quite sure how she ended up running a soup kitchen.
“I wasn’t really looking for this job. It kind of found me,” she said.
Hayes is a full-time professor at Ball State University, teaching environment, geology and natural resources. A friend told her the Soup Kitchen of Muncie had been searching for a new executive director for months.
“I had no idea that there was a search going on,” Hayes said. “I thought about it, checked it out, and then another person nudged me. So then I went, ‘OK, I’ll look into this.’ I applied, and the next day after that I had an interview lined up.”
Board President Dottie Kreps has been with the Soup Kitchen for close to two decades, first as a weekly volunteer, then on the board, then as vice president, and now in her second year as president. She said it wasn’t just Hayes’s background that stood out to her, but rather how she showed up to talk about it.
“In her second interview, she came prepared with ‘How does the war affect the farmers globally, but then how does that affect locally? How does that trickle down then to what our supply is gonna look like at the soup kitchen?’” Kreps said. “Not even having the job yet, she was looking at how we would prepare if this happened. It was that background that she had; it all kind of fit together with what we were looking for.”
Hayes is just over a month into the job as executive director of the Soup Kitchen of Muncie. She arrives alongside a new kitchen manager, Michael Heskett, as the Soup Kitchen stabilizes its leadership at a moment when the need it was built to meet keeps climbing.
The Soup Kitchen of Muncie has been serving hot meals out of its building on East Charles Street for roughly three decades. Doors open weekday mornings, no ID required, no questions asked. Guests get a hot meal and a sack lunch to take with them.
In 2024, its 30th anniversary year, the Soup Kitchen served more than 47,000 individuals and put out upward of 94,000 meals.
None of it runs on payroll alone; the kitchen runs on one full-time staff member, a part-time kitchen manager, a working board of directors, and volunteers who show up to help.
Hayes said people contribute in whatever way they can. Some bring eggs or baked goods on a regular schedule, others donate meat or produce when it’s available, and a handful of churches and community groups pitch in as well.
Loretta Parsons has been around the Soup Kitchen longer than either Hayes or Kreps. She came in decades ago as a volunteer, part of a small group of widowed and divorced friends looking for something to do on Sunday afternoons.They started what she called a “Sunday supper,” opening the doors to whoever needed it.
“I was just astonished that there were this many people that needed food in the community that I had lived in most of my life,” Parsons said. “It brought me to tears to think that people had to struggle.”
Back then, a busy day meant 75 guests. By the time Parsons stepped back from running the place, the Soup Kitchen was regularly serving close to 275 people a day, including through the pandemic, when the building closed for six weeks in early 2020 before switching to sack lunches handed out the door.
The dining room didn’t fully reopen until the year after the pandemic. It’s since been dedicated in her honor.
“That was just a little bit overwhelming,” Parsons said. “It meant a lot to me, that folks thought that what I had done for the years I’ve been here was worth that recognition.”
Ask Hayes what success looks like two or three years from now, and she resists the premise.
“We feed people, but also, if we’re feeding more people, that means more people are hungry,” she said. “Our success is not necessarily good for our community, but it is if we’re accessing more people to feed them, then we’re at least getting food to more people.”
For her, the real measure isn’t the number of meals served.
“Making sure that we’re enriching people’s lives and bringing them dignity and compassion, that’s our metrics of success,” she said. “I’m trying to turn compassion into currency. How can we actually mobilize compassion in our communities by making it something that people want to spend?”
Asked what she needs most from Muncie, she didn’t hesitate: more intention and more compassion.
Hayes said that if people acted with real intention, much of the friction and red tape that slow things down would disappear on their own. She sees food, water and shelter as basic human rights rather than commodities and argues that treating people with dignity matters just as much as the meal itself, since no one can get by without food in the first place.
Parsons’ advice to her successor was simpler than any of it: Take one day at a time, because no two are the same.
“You really have to like people,” she said, smiling.
To find more information about the Soup Kitchen of Muncie, including how to volunteer or donate, head to its website at soupkitchenofmuncie.org.
This article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: New leadership at Muncie’s Soup Kitchen promises to continue its mission
Reporting by Trinity Rea, Muncie Star Press / Muncie Star Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Trinity Rea, Muncie Star Press | USA TODAY Network
