Thank you for being part of our dinner team program!
Your combined efforts allow us to provide home-cooked meals to 21 guests in the Hixon House Adult Shelter 365 days a year. We care about your experience. Please feel email our volunteer coordinator with any photos or comments from your dinner team. This is a wonderful way to share with other potential volunteers what it's like to be on a dinner team.
Amount of Food to Prepare
Please prepare enough food for 25 people plus yourselves. Check the dinner team calendar to see the types of food that have been served so you can plan a menu. Most teams prepare an entrée and one or two side dishes. You are welcome to shop our Food Shelf to help with meat, vegetables, rice, pasta, and bread.
You do not need to worry about drinks since we provide those.
Ingredients, Staples, and Accessing Food from the Food Shelf
Shopping the Food Shelf for your dinner team:
We appreciate your dinner team’s time and investment cooking for Hixon House. If your team would like to use food from our Food Shelf, feel free to contact Matt Pickell for a Food Shelf orientation prior to your dinner team date. It works best to have two people from your team trained to shop the Food Shelf.
We recommend that you have a general menu in mind when you shop. If the Food Shelf is lacking some of the ingredients you need to make your dinner, we suggest that you substitute with ingredients we do have, or you are welcome to purchase missing ingredients at the store if your personal budget allows.
Request meat in advance:
Meat needs to be requested in advance by emailing Matt one week before you are scheduled to cook. Because our stock of meat differs on any given day, it is important to give us a week to reserve meat for your dinner team. We defrost our meat a day before it is needed.
Staple items:
Hixon House is stocked with butter, eggs, milk, cheese, spices, condiments, dressings, and dry goods for baking. You have complete access to these ingredients while cooking at Hixon House.
Dinner Team Models
Family and Friends: Team BOM
Our dinner team is a group of three family friends from the Upper Valley who jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the Hixon dinner program. Knowing the importance of a warm meal at the end of your day and helping to promote the Haven’s mission of community spirit make this a monthly event we all look forward to sharing.
We typically prepare most of our meals at home, but that changes depending on the season as we like to make use of the grill in the summer. Through the colder months we favor casserole, chilis, stews—they’re called comfort foods for a reason! Whatever the menu, we finds the guests grateful, appreciative, and welcoming.
Our monthly dinner with Haven guests is just a small piece that we can do to hopefully make someone’s day a little easier through food and friendship.
Graduate Relief Team: Dartmouth College
Our graduate student dinner team is filled with like-minded graduate students across all departments who are committed to contributing to the greater community outside of Dartmouth College. We normally recruit students by dissemination of messages through our student government to let the student body know about our monthly service event and provide them with a sign-up sheet to coordinate carpooling and meals at Hixon. Our team’s success stems from the enthusiasm to do public good, commitment to the mission, and community growth fostered by the graduate students at Dartmouth. We take this monthly opportunity to build friendships with each other and have a fun, relaxing, de-stressing time at Hixon House.
Pot Luck Friends
Most people know how great a pot luck can be. This approach allows busy people to volunteer when they can on their own terms. One or two people share the planning of eight dishes for 8-10 people. A group of 15-20 friends are emailed about 12 days before the meal date and the first eight to reply with a favorite dish make that month’s meal. (The team captain keeps track—this can take a few emails.) This way volunteers don’t need to cook each month and there is always variety! This approach takes some coordination, but creates an opportunity for people with busy lives to make an impact on adults in our community facing challenges while showing their cooking skills.
King Arthur Flour and Hypertherm
King Arthur Flour and Hypertherm encourage employees to use paid volunteer time, making it easy for their staff to volunteer. King Arthur Flour chooses team captains to coordinate department dinner teams multiple times each month. The employees use the kitchens at King Arthur Flour to make dinner and deliver the meal to Hixon House to serve at 6:30 p.m., making it easy for employees to participate.
Hypertherm has a point person who manages two dinner teams each month and recruits employees to cook at Hixon House. They bring the ingredients for the meal around 5:00 p.m. and cook for 21 people, interacting with our guests and giving back to the community.