Costa Mesa soup kitchen celebrates 30 years of caring
Someone Cares Soup Kitchen has been living up to its name for three decades, and now the Costa Mesa-based nonprofit is celebrating with a special fundraiser Saturday.
The soup kitchen’s 30th-anniversary gala will begin at 6 p.m. at the Marconi Automotive Museum in Tustin. Tickets are $150 and are available at someonecareskitchen.org.
The nonprofit was founded in 1986 by Merle Hatleberg, a San Clemente resident who at the time was working with Costa Mesa senior citizens and saw a need to feed the city’s hungry. As the story goes, Someone Cares’ first pot of soup was served June 15, 1986. It fed about 30 people.
Operations continued at local churches and the Rea Community Center until 1997, when Someone Cares found a permanent home at a former Chinese restaurant on West 19th Street.
Hatleberg was denied a bank loan for the site, but in a handshake deal with the restaurant’s owner, So Ching Lee, she put down $100,000 and took over the place.
Lee still technically had the land deed, and Someone Cares paid mortgage payments directly to Lee until owning the property outright in 2006.
Now, nearly 20 years after moving into 720 W. 19th St., the soup kitchen feeds about 325 people a day and serves 117,000 meals annually. The nonprofit has 11 paid staff members and some 60 volunteers each day.
It also offers after-school tutoring for kindergarten through fourth grade.
Food is served from noon to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 9 to 11 a.m. Saturdays and Sundays. No one is turned down from eating there, except if drunk or under the influence of drugs.
Area restaurants donate food, and sometimes the offerings are much better than one might expect: Trader Joe’s products, Norwegian salmon, New York steak.
Shannon Santos, Someone Cares’ executive director and Hatleberg’s granddaughter, said many of the soup kitchen’s clients are seniors who live nearby in the Tower, the senior affordable-housing complex formerly known as Bethel Towers.
Someone Cares’ 30-year history has had its highs and lows. Some were funny, like when firefighters showed up thinking they had to extinguish flames during the soup kitchen’s “burn the mortgage” fundraising event.
Others were joyous, like last year, when the nonprofit received $10,000 in IKEA store credit and used it to spruce up the place.
Then there were lows, like in 2012, when then-Mayor Eric Bever targeted the nonprofit, feeling Someone Cares was attracting homeless people to Costa Mesa.
“These businesses — nonprofit, profit, whatever — are creating tremendous impacts on our community,” Bever said at the time.
According to Santos, Bever’s words created a “huge buzz.” Many groups came to the soup kitchen’s aid, she said.
“It was inspiring, in a sense, to see the support that came out of a negative situation,” Santos said.
Hatleberg, who died in 2007 at age 83, has not been forgotten. A wall in the soup kitchen near Santos’ office is dedicated to her, noting moments like when she won the Clara Barton Award from the American Red Cross.
“It was all about the soup kitchen,” Santos said of her grandmother’s passion. “She ate, slept, breathed it.”
Santos pointed to a picture of Hatleberg and Cliff Shore, an original Someone Cares volunteer, that was taken in 1986 at the Rea Community Center. The pair held a Someone Cares Soup Kitchen sign noting “free soup and bread.”
“That’s our history,” Santos said.
Twitter: @BradleyZint
