ROCHELLE — When asked about what it will be like for her to hand over the keys to the building that houses The Kitchen Table upon the closing of its coming sale, Carolyn Brown, the Rochelle nonprofit’s founder, got tears in her eyes.
“It's going to be hard,” Brown said. “But I can't back out now. I already committed. The buyers came about, and we looked at our numbers and made the decision. And we’ve dealt with the aggravation and lots of different factors.”
The donation and volunteer-based eatery/community pay-what-you-can café will not operate this winter after Nov. 21. The building will soon be sold to a for-profit restaurant in need of a location. The non-profit proceeds from the sale will be donated to a local charity. The Kitchen Table will remain as an organization, and plans to host community dinners at the soon-to-be-sold 7034 S. Klondike Road location on occasion and possibly at other venues likely starting next May.
Brown and Kitchen Table Board Member Bob Alder said the organization came to the decision to sell due to a shortage of resources and volunteers, and overwhelming need. The nonprofit can no longer pay its bills and get the food it needs. Volunteers have dwindled to a group of six people, who are often performing multiple duties at once.
“That just isn't enough,” Brown said. “On our most recent serving night, we served 144 meals in two hours. We're lucky if we take in $300 on a night like that. We have bills just like any other restaurant has. We're taking in $1,200-1,300 a month but our bills cost us around $2,200 a month at a bare minimum. We've struggled for help since day one. We do have a nice core group, but we're all doing double duty.”
The Kitchen Table’s building was purchased Feb. 19, 2013 and opened June 30, 2016 after renovations were done. It was created as a place where people could enjoy a home-cooked meal on a pay-what-you-can basis, and as a reciprocal space where volunteering could earn food, fostering a sense of community.
After the nonprofit saw lines out the door of people waiting for tables to open up, seating space was expanded after a visit from TV’s Mike Rowe, who donated what is now the Rowe Pavilion at the location. That extra seating space hasn’t been needed since the COVID-19 pandemic, with more pickup and delivery orders being requested since 2020. Brown and Alder believe a shift in society has made The Kitchen Table’s original mission harder to carry out.
The Kitchen Table saw a $50,000 drop in donations from 2022 to 2023, and it started to have to utilize its reserve funds when it cut serving nights from two nights to one per week in 2024.
“We used to have so much fun when we started in 2016,” Brown said. “We enjoyed it. I looked forward to it. We had a blast making food and we were lucky if we served 30 people when we first opened. I always said if it ever became like work, we shouldn't be doing it. And I said if it ever got to where it wasn't supporting itself, we'd stop.”
The Kitchen Table’s leadership is looking forward to relieving itself of the building’s expenses to allow it to operate in the future, and possibly looking to find a better and more productive way to serve the community.
The nonprofit has served over 100,000 meals since opening the location, sometimes as many as 18,000 meals a year.
“We know there's still a need there and we can still help with that,” Brown said. “We can still do dinners here. We can still go to churches and do dinners. We can pick up and do a dinner anywhere. We just have to get back to where we enjoy it and everybody understands what the concept is behind it. We're just trying to find a different way to be productive that's less stressful. And even if we do a dinner a month, there's always other ways to help people that need it. I feel recently it hasn't been as productive as we intended it to be and what we were in the beginning.”
Rowe’s visit to The Kitchen Table is among Brown’s fondest memories since 2016. She often thinks about what path the nonprofit would be on if COVID-19 hadn’t occurred. Rowe was scheduled to make a second visit before the shutdowns took place in 2020.
Alder’s memories of The Kitchen Table stretch all the way back to the first night he came in for dinner after being new to town. He met new friends at sat and ate with them each Thursday. He recalls meeting Brown’s daughter, who had a newborn son who he would look after to give her some time to eat.
“Being able to help and community was what this was about,” Alder said. “Now I'm so busy on the nights when we work that I don't get to talk to anybody anymore. I'm sad it's closing and that we had to go down this road. Based on serving 100,000 meals, you can't tell me there isn't someone in the community we’ve served that can't come out and work one day a year. If every one of those worked just one day a year, we could be open seven days a week.”
Brown and Alder admitted that dealing with changes in societal dynamics and long hours of short-staffed work have caused them to lose some faith in their cause in recent years. They’re looking forward to a new, different endeavor for The Kitchen Table.
“It's not supposed to feel like work,” Brown said. “We thought feeding people would be good enough to get volunteers, but it's not. And when you feel like you're begging for help, that's a problem. We can only stretch ourselves so far. I think it's time to figure out a different way to do things and do them in a better fashion. We have to get back to the purpose of why we started this place.”
