The hot meal program started with a simple observation: some families in the Kurdish American community do not have a reliable daily meal. This might be because of poverty, because of illness or disability that makes cooking difficult, because of isolation, or because of some combination of all three. A food package once a month addresses some of this, but what some families need is the actual meal, prepared and delivered, on a regular basis.

KASA’s hot meal distribution runs weekly, with volunteers preparing meals in community kitchens and delivering them to a roster of households that have been identified as regularly in need. The meals are Kurdish food — the kind of food these families grew up with, the kind that does more than provide calories. They signal: you are not forgotten. Your community knows you are here.

The volunteers who prepare and deliver these meals are the core of this program. Many of them are giving a half-day every week to make it happen. Some have been doing it for years. They know the families they serve by name, know their preferences, know when something seems off. The meal delivery is also a welfare check, and more than once it has surfaced a problem that needed addressing beyond what a hot meal could solve.