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SALT LAKE CITY — Carolyn Erickson lives in a local condominium, one that is full of good taste and lots of dishes.
"You can never have too many bowls," she said, as she filled her arms with carefully selected stacks of the beautifully hand-crafted ceramics available for purchase at St. Vincent de Paul's Dining Hall on Saturday.
The annual fundraiser is an event Erickson doesn't like to miss.
"I don't have a particular interest in pottery, ordinarily," she said, adding that feeding the homeless is reason enough to participate each year. The "lovely and exquisite" quality of the wares, Erickson said, is just an added bonus.
Each bowl, most of them priced $20, but available up to $100 each, leads to more people being fed at the popular, no-questions-asked dining hall.
While the food served there — roughly two hot meals a day, seven days a week — is created from donations and help from the LDS Bishops' Storehouse, the Utah Food Bank and its Grocery Rescue program and other local efforts, the facility needs money to keep it going, said Dennis Kelsch, homeless services director with Catholic Community Services. He said dumpster rental is around $600 a month, and of course there's utilities and equipment costs, including weekly replacement of reusable plastic cups "that disappear out the door on a regular basis."
This particular soup kitchen, located at 437 W. 200 South, serves 1,200 meals a day during lunch and dinner. Each bowl purchased at the Empty Bowls fundraising event leads to another 22 meals — roughly a family of five — being fed for the day.
"There's always people coming through here for a number of reasons," Kelsch said, adding that Salt Lake City's homeless population contains individuals facing employment issues, as well as those living with mental illness and drug problems. There's been a recent surge in the number of young families coming through, he said.
"We open our doors to everyone," Kelsch added.
Catholic Community Services operates the soup kitchen with help from volunteers who show up to help prepare and serve the meals each day. Utah Clay Arts partners with the nonprofit to offer the sale as the only fundraiser held annually to benefit the facility.
Last year, sales topped $10,000, a record for the event, which has been going strong each year for more than a decade.
Local artists hold "bowl-a-thons" in the weeks leading up to the event, said Danielle Stamos, a spokeswoman for Catholic Community Services. She said elementary schools also donate bowls and pots made by school children in an effort to teach them about homelessness and community service.
"We could not do this without the volunteers and the generosity of the community," Stamos said. "We serve seven days a week, rain or shine, and people always show up."
In addition to a wide variety of ceramic and wooden bowls, available in every shape, size and color, patrons are offered a bowl of soup at the dining hall, with live music playing. The facility's typical customers — the homeless — were offered a sack lunch earlier in the day to accommodate for the fundraiser and were invited back inside for dinner.
Kelsch said he didn't want the public to be alarmed as some homeless people the kitchen serves have behavioral problems or don't necessarily know how to act in a crowd. The numbers, he said, might also have been overwhelming.
For more information about volunteer opportunities or to participate in next year's Empty Bowls event, visit www.ccsutah.org.
"This is a big community effort," Stamos said. "Everyone comes together to make these bowls. And it really makes a difference in the number of people we can serve. The more people we serve, the fewer who go hungry."
