Yelm Lions Club concludes ‘Souper Sunday’ after 14 weekends of community gatherings

By the community. For the community.

For the last 14 weeks, Yelm Lions Club has exemplified that statement by welcoming community members of all walks of life into the Carlson Club each Sunday for a hot meal and camaraderie with neighbors. These weekly gatherings, put on by volunteers, were known as “Souper Sunday.”

Ashley Brooks, membership chair for the Yelm Lions Club, told the Nisqually Valley News on Monday, Feb. 23, that she was extremely grateful to have experienced that last 14-weeks of community bonding.

“I’m still reflecting on all of the Sundays that I’ve spent with these amazing people,” Brooks said. “We’ve had 43-plus volunteers. A quarter of them were under the age of 18, so they were very youth-involved. In total, we served 1,400 bowls of soup. It was roughly 100 bowls of soup every Sunday that we were packaging to go or serving for someone to dine in. It was amazing.”

She added that the community was able to step up in a big way by donating different items to be included in the soup, helping cook dinner each Sunday, providing fresh ingredients and presenting a variety of different dining options.

“In a time where things seem really divisive, you’re left or right, black or white — people can’t live in the grey and people can’t get along with each other,” she said. “What the Lions Club does in all their programs is we make sure we don’t talk about politics. We don’t talk about faith. Everybody comes from a different household. I think that made it to where more people were becoming friends and approaching these relationships with mutual respect.”

Brooks added that residents of the region from all different walks of life and incomes attended Souper Sunday events each weekend. Attendees spanned from mayor Joe DePinto to detective Kevin Burton Crow, to some residents in between jobs.

Regardless of financial or social standing, Souper Sunday provided an environment for members of the local community to break bread and bond.

Following the conclusion of Souper Sunday, Brooks said she returned the event’s core group of volunteers for a meeting, and was met with the question of “what am I going to do on Sundays now?” She noted that the weekly event was only set to span from November through February.

“I thought that we should have a breakfast,” Brooks said. “We already do the pancake breakfast with the Santa shop, and I guess most Lions Clubs, internationally and locally, do breakfast. So we’re going to start doing monthly breakfasts.”

The Yelm Lions Club’s first breakfast is set for 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, March 15, inside of the Carlson Cabin. One of the organization’s longest tenured members, the Wilcox family, often donates to the organization and has provided an abundance of eggs to the organization to be used, according to Brooks.

“We’ll have eggs. We’ll make pancakes. We’ll have biscuits and gravy,” she said. “Our food has always been fresh, not bottom of the barrel scraps. It’s always been what you would feed your family if they came over for dinner. We’re going to do that same thing, potluck style, for breakfast.”

Yelm Lions Club can be located at 301 West Yelm Avenue. To learn more about the organization, visit its self-titled Facebook page, or its website at https://www.e-clubhouse.org/sites/yelmwa/.