After more than 25 years of feeding Durangoans living on the edge economically, Manna Soup Kitchen is taking the next step – preparing to teach its clients new skills so they can feed themselves.

To do that, Manna is adding a training kitchen to its facilities.

“This expansion isn’t to serve more people,” said Manna’s new executive director, Kathy Tonnessen. “It’s to serve differently. This trend of the need going up and up and up just isn’t sustainable.”

The decision began with some research – a feasibility study done by looking at The Durango Herald, said Larry Turner, chairman of the construction committee. “We tracked the want ads, and restaurants are where the jobs are.”

Their study found 11 percent of the job openings were in the kitchen, and another 7 percent were for wait staff and positions in the front of the restaurant, he said. The other big area for openings was in health services, but Southwest Colorado Community College is addressing those training needs.

Weeminuche Construction Authority, which won the bid for the project, currently is preparing the site, which will include cutting into the side of the hill, building a restraining wall and clearing the area where additional parking will go. The scheduled completion of the building is April 14, 2014, with a few more months to finish the interior.

“The site’s very challenging,” Turner said. He has developed several properties in the Durango area, but this is his first time as a volunteer. “But with the veterans home, shelter, halfway house and Manna, this is a pretty good use of this hillside.”

The new 3,170-square-foot facility, which will be south of the current building, will have two floors, including a kitchen, classroom and covered deck upstairs and four administrative offices and meeting rooms downstairs. A parking-lot extension will add 29 spots. That’s 17 more than required by city codes, but Manna wants to alleviate some of the parking stress on the neighborhood, Turner said.

Capital campaign

Total cost for the project, including kitchen appliances and furniture, is about $933,000. After receiving a donation from the Karrakin Foundation of $500,000 and another $75,000 raised to date, Manna still needs to raise about $358,000, and the capital campaign is beginning.

Longtime board member Caroline Kinser is heading up the curriculum design for the program.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” Tonnessen said. “We’re looking at similar successful programs, like Catalyst Kitchens out of Seattle, and we’re talking to the community college. But whatever we do, it will be accredited.”

Moving the offices into the new building will allow Manna to expand its current dining room, which also is needed.

Manna is on track to serve 70,000 meals this year, the kind of record no one wants to break. That’s up from 35,170 in 2007, doubling since the recession began.

About 30 percent of all meals served are sack lunches, and the soup kitchen’s Wednesday-night dinners are averaging about 100 people, many of them working families who need to stretch their grocery budget.

“Not everyone who comes is destitute,” Tonnessen said. “For some, this is their community.”

Not such a new face

Tonnessen, who started in July, sat on Manna’s board of directors for about two years and as a volunteer for three years before that. It has given her a perspective of Manna, its clients and its operations from several different angles.

“I have a heart for service,” she said. “For whatever reason, I have that in me. And we need to acknowledge we all could be there needing help.”

After growing up on the Front Range in Broomfield and Boulder, she graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in finance.

She and her husband, Rick, who is a project manager with FCI Construction, along with son, Gabe, 18, heading into his senior year at Durango High School, moved to Durango about five years ago. Older son Jake, 24, is finishing a master’s degree in engineering at his mother’s alma mater.

For the last five years, Tonnessen was a funeral and after-care director at Hood Mortuary, work that played off her experiences volunteering for hospice in Gunnison, the family’s previous home for 15 years.

She has been a massage therapist and managed a small personal-growth company. But she also spent eight years as assistant director of the Western State College Foundation.

“I managed funds, scholarships, the gains and losses on investments, the financial aspects,” she said.

A new task in her job at Manna is that of writing grants, so Tonnessen is seeking advice from other nonprofit leaders in the area to help get her up to speed.

Perhaps her most important task is just getting the community through the doors to see what Manna does.

“Once someone’s been up here, it’s quite easy to get them to come back,” Turner said.

abutler@durangoherald.com

Manna expansion exterior (PDF)

Manna Expansion First Floor (PDF)

Manna Expansion Second Floor (PDF)

Manna Expansion Site Map (PDF)

To donate

Donations to the capital campaign for the new addition can be mailed to Manna Soup Kitchen, P.O. Box 1196, Durango, CO 81302, with “capital campaign” in the memo line.

Manna is holding a fundraiser for the campaign called Pave the Way from 5 to 8 p.m. Oct. 19 at Durango Discovery Museum. Tickets are $50 per person or $90 per couple. Commemoration bricks to pave a path between the current building and the new facility will be available as part of the fundraising.