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Newman Center Prepares For 51st Annual Thanksgiving Dinner

Newman Center
Benjy Jeffords
/
WSIU
Newman Center

If you’re still without a place to go for Thanksgiving the Newman Center in Carbondale has a seat for you.

Newman Catholic Student Center has been providing a Thanksgiving Day meal for the last 51 years.

Back in the late 60’s The Newman Center provided a Thanksgiving meal for a small group of students who didn’t have anywhere to go.

Over 50 years later, they’re still doing it.

“There are a lot of students, a lot of university people, a lot of community members that come to this.”

For the last 26 years JP Dunn has volunteered his time to help prepare the meal.

Now he’s organizes about 50 volunteers during the week long preparation.

“We have people that will come in during the week and they’ll help us out one day or two days and there are people that are there all week.”

On top of the 400 people that come through the door, the Newman Center takes over the meals on wheels delivery for Thursday and Friday.

“Some of those are people that will come in a dine with us and some of them carry it out and we do quite a few deliveries, we did over 250 deliveries last year.”

Dunn says seeing the appreciation from the community is reason he‘s continued giving back for over two decades.

“Some of them you can see it really touches them that there are people that volunteer to come in and do this kind of work and serve a meal for them and not ask anything in return.”

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