How Lex Eat Together is tackling food insecurity in Lexington and beyond

In 2015, Lexington residents ​Harriet Kaufmann, John Bernhard, George Murnaghan and Laura Derby were volunteering together to help homeless families staying in a local motel when they realized Lexington needed a community gathering to address food insecurity.

They agreed that despite Lexington’s perceived affluence, there was a real need for greater assistance to households with insufficient access to food.

After a year of planning, their new organization, aptly named Lex Eat Together by longtime resident Sophia Ho, began holding a free weekly community dinner at the Church of Our Redeemer.

The goal of the dinners was to provide an environment for families and individuals facing food insecurity to come together and enjoy a shared meal.

“We were all agreed that it would be a warm, welcoming, accepting place—and I have to say that it really was,” Kaufmann said, who now serves as a Lex Eat Together board member with Bernhard, Murnaghan and Derby. “Anybody who was there during those dinners felt at home. You could feel it when you went in the room.”

The meals attracted dozens of participants of diverse backgrounds.

“It is very impressive how informally folks have come together in different ways… We’ve had [volunteers and recipients who were] LHS students. We’ve had senior folks, folks with kids,” Kaufmann said.

When COVID-19 hit, the organization was forced to shut down the in-person meals. Lex Eat Together ultimately ended their weekly community dinners due to logistical and health concerns.

“We looked at trying to restart it, but it became difficult, especially as a large portion of our population—both guests and volunteers—tends to be older,” Murnaghan said. “We made a decision to go a different direction, which was offering prepared meals for pickup, which required less volunteers and didn’t have to involve the community dinner in person.”

Adjusting to the pickup service was difficult for some of the volunteers, who had attended the meals every week for years and formed close relationships with other participants. 

Christin Worcester, the “head server” for the in-person dinners before they ended, said: “All the other wonderful elements of people getting together and having companionship and being together was gone… but [volunteering for the pickup dinners was] still a way for me to give back and do things in my community.”

Lex Eat Together now focuses on three main initiatives, the first of which provides meals for Middlesex Community College (MCC) students. Every Wednesday, about a half-dozen volunteers come together at the Church of Our Redeemer to make approximately 200 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for low-income students at MCC. 

“It’s a very satisfying volunteer gig,” Derby said. “In a world today where it’s hard to know what you can do to make a difference, it’s very satisfying to come together with people and know you’ve made sandwiches… and the meaning of these sandwiches to the students is enormous. These are students who are struggling; many of them are parents.”

Their second initiative is to feed unhoused individuals and families living in the Community Day Center, a shelter in Waltham. On Thursdays, volunteers come together to make sandwiches that are delivered to the Community Day Center.

Lex Eat Together’s newest initiative just launched this week: The group is ending its weekly pre-prepared meal pickup and transitioning to a frozen meal delivery service. The effort is in conjunction with the Lexington Interfaith Food Pantry and Open Table. Open Table is a food pantry based in Maynard that helps distribute meals to 21 towns in Middlesex County.

Bernhard said that this change is motivated by a strategic shift to optimizing their resources to have the greatest impact possible in combating food insecurity. 

“Where we started out, we were doing it all ourselves in terms of bringing people together, cooking the meals, serving the meals… We’re stepping out of the frontline and looking to support other established efforts and strengthen them,” Bernhard said.

Now, ten years since its founding, Lex Eat Together has served more than 25,000 meals to people in need. 

Going forward, the organization hopes to increase its weekly meal output to 400 meals, and attract more funding and volunteers so they can continue their work. 

“Frankly, as with many other organizations, it is getting harder to find volunteers—which is sad, but true,” Murnaghan said.

Lex Eat Together also aims to increase its advocacy for action by the Town, especially as the hunger crisis has been worsened by recent reductions in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

“Lexington itself does not do nearly enough to help with food insecurity,” Kaufmann said. “Our hope is to be more of a voice to help the Lexington community… and to make a more meaningful dent in this problem.”