Missing Meals

Butler Community Meal Ministries is seeing a spike in attendance in the weeks leading up to a stoppage in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and its leadership is unsure how it will manage to support it.

Justine Brown, one of the community meals coordinators and a manager at Katie’s Kitchen at St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, said the meal at St. Mark’s usually sees an average of 340 attendees — but this past week was different.

“We served over 400 people at a meal twice,” she said of the last week. “Katie’s served 418 and another (location) served 408.”

Butler Community Meal Ministries is a collaborative effort to provide nightly meals to residents in the Butler area. Through the program, a meal is offered at a church each weeknight between

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