The Ottawa Mission gears up for largest Thanksgiving meal yet

Approximately three weeks of preparation have gone into The Ottawa Mission’s Thanksgiving meal, CEO Peter Tilley told CityNews. That’s all, so everyone in Ottawa can access a comforting holiday meal.

Between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday, the Mission will serve a Thanksgiving feast to those across the community from its location downtown.

Tilley said volunteers and staff have been hard at work for three weeks, prepping frozen turkeys and plating food, all of which will be served tomorrow.

“The day of the big meal tomorrow, starting at 4 a.m., we start bringing out the trays and steaming them so that we maintain the freshness and they’re still juicy pieces of meat when we serve them up to the people who come in our doors,” he said.

It’s the first big meal of the season; the last one served by the Mission was its Easter meal in April.

Tilley said this meal is also special because this time of year is about giving thanks, and it warms his heart to see the gratitude in the people the Mission serves.

“Many who went through our addiction program, people we placed into housing, they like to come back for the holiday meals,” he said. “They’re living in a bachelor or a rooming house, and they would be otherwise sitting at home alone, even if they picked up a frozen dinner of some sort. So instead they’re going to come in, enjoy a full Thanksgiving meal, sit at a table with some old friends, and certainly the staff and volunteers recognize the people who come in and we’ll celebrate with them.”

With sun and 16 C temperatures in the forecast, Tilley said he expects a big turnout tomorrow. In 2024, he said the nice weather brought in people walking and taking the bus and the Mission served a record 17,257 meals.

Including the meals served through the Mission’s 41 food truck stops throughout the week, he expects another 17,000 meals to be served this year.

Preparations for the big day are shaping up well despite some major challenges faced by the charity recently, the main one being the Canada Post strike.

“We begin our ‘$4.68 will feed a homeless person at Thanksgiving’ campaign, that mail-out flyer, and believe it or not, a third of our donations that come in from that are not online,” Tilley said. “They’re from quite often an older demographic who are still more comfortable to put a check in the mail for about $100 or $200.”

Last week, the Mission mentioned it wasn’t able to purchase enough turkeys because the campaign hadn’t brought in the donations it had hoped for. Within seven days, 200 turkeys were dropped off.

A big drop off was coordinated by a manager at one of Ottawa’s downtown Loblaws locations. The three stores that surround the Mission came together to donate 60 turkeys.

“When I was a kid, I put myself through college working at Loblaws,” Tilley said. “So that one touched my heart.”