Saint John's 'short-term' soup kitchen marks 40 years of service

It was supposed to be a short-term fix for some economic hard times in Saint John.

But 40 years after it opened, Romero House is still operating 365 days a year, serving meals to people in need.

Evelyn McNulty, the executive director and daughter of the founder, the late Carolyn McNulty, said the saddest part is that the need appears to be growing.

"You know, I find it very disheartening that I'm seeing at our window here a tremendous amount of senior citizens that we've never seen before," she said in an interview.

"The need now is greater than it's ever been before and we're dropping the ball as a society, I guess, in trying to find a solution."

McNulty said the lesson is obvious.

"So what it tells me is we've had a soup kitchen for 40 years and we're still talking about the same things we were talking 40 years ago."

Short-term fix?

Times were tough in the winter of 1982 in Saint John.

A worldwide recession had hit the city hard, and McNulty said her mother noticed that people in her west-side neighbourhood were struggling to make ends meet.

"Also at that time, In The Courts, which was a section in the local newspaper, there was a tremendous increase in people being in the courts for stealing food, primarily seniors," McNulty recalled.

"And that hit a chord with my mother, and moved her I guess to take some kind of action to alleviate some of the problems some of the people were having."

Carolyn McNulty was a devout Christian, and her daughter said she saw the need to help as a calling.

She and a few friends got together and found a one-room space on Union Street to open a soup kitchen.

It soon became clear it wasn't big enough, so they moved to Water Street in a building that had space to share with the city's first food bank.

As the end of the decade approached, Carolyn decided the need for a soup kitchen wasn't going to go away, and that a purpose-built location was the next step.

Until then, she had operated the charity by donations alone. Carolyn was adamant she would not take money that came with strings attached.

Evelyn McNulty said her mother approached the local union leadership for help building the new location.

During construction, the soup kitchen volunteers never missed a beat.

"They served one day on Water Street and the next day here on Brunswick Drive without missing a day and the building was paid for," Evelyn said.

Critical of political effort

During her days as executive director, Carolyn McNulty was often critical of political leaders. She refused to allow politicians to visit the soup kitchen when meals were being served, to avoid photo-op visits.

In an interview with CBC in 2012, she said she was angry at this country's leaders at all levels of government for their inability to find solutions to poverty.

"I know in the Bible it says we'll always have the poor with us, but this is more than just always having the poor with us," she said.

"This is not fair. It's not a fair distribution of the goods that this country has."

At the time of that conversation, 30 years into its history, Carolyn McNulty said the charity had served over two million meals, averaging about 55,000 a year.

Evelyn McNulty said those numbers are still increasing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the past week, Romero House served 2,823 meals at noon hour each day, an average of just over 400 a day.

At that pace, it's nearly 147,000 meals, about triple what her mother was seeing just 10 years ago.

'A little neighbourhood'

Evelyn said the soup kitchen is now doing the job once done by neighbours. She recalled people in her childhood neighbourhood making and donating food to a family after the father lost his office job.

"As things progressed and we've moved further and further away from each other, those neighbourhoods are not the same," she said. "And Romero House has, in my vision anyway, become like a little neighbourhood."