The Soul’s Harbour Rescue Mission has expanded into Amherst, and will be serving lunch free of charge every weekday from noon to 2pm at the Amherst Wesleyan Church on Malty Court, about two kilometres from downtown Amherst.
Local chef Andrew Harrison says he and a group of volunteers served about 60 people during the ‘soft opening’ of the new soup kitchen last Tuesday.
Soul’s Harbour is a faith based operation that started in Halifax 15 years ago, and has since expanded across Nova Scotia with soup kitchens, addiction recovery centres, and affordable housing. The group’s Halifax-based Mission thrift store funds about half of its projects, according to Chief Operating Officer Cherry Laxton.
Amherst is the sixth satellite location for Soul’s Harbour in Nova Scotia, and Laxton says the group of two staff and volunteers are prepared to serve as many as they can every weekday lunch hour.
“We’ve certainly seen growth in some of our smaller locations,” says Laxton. “Like Truro and Bridgewater, for example, where we started off with 30-40 people a day, and now we’re serving 100 people a day, which really speaks to the amount of need that we’ve seen in the community over the last couple of years.”
Laxton says the Amherst satellite came about thanks to “connections in the community, and just exploring those connections led us to see that there was a need here.”
Laxton said there was capacity at the Amherst Wesleyan Church hall, so the pastor “invited us to come and have a look and said, listen, if you guys really could think you could come here and meet some needs in this community, by all means, come and use the space.”
Laxton says that Soul’s Harbour relies on roughly 2000 volunteers across Nova Scotia for its expanding programs.
“The amount of growth that we’ve seen, obviously, has been phenomenal,” says Laxton. “The unfortunate thing is that a lot of small communities across this province could use one of us, or one of someone who’s willing to come in and meet those needs right now.”
