As Meg Philips, head of the Dulles South Food Pantry remembers it, “It was the height of the pandemic and we were working with a small, small group of staff and volunteers, trying to feed people in need,” when Devina Mahapatra reached out asking about starting a soup kitchen. Meg told her, "That would be so great; here are some ideas." She thought, "a lot of people have really big hearts and really good intentions but aren't necessarily doers. Then, three months later, Devina emailed, ‘Okay, we're ready.’”
In those three months, Devina posted a website, raised donations of fresh produce and other food, and found a small kitchen and volunteers to help make nutritious, home cooked meals, all while working full time and raising her own family. Within weeks, flyers went out to families who relied on the food pantry about where to pick them up.
From humble beginnings, feeding a couple dozen families, the Dulles Soup Kitchen has blossomed to a finely tuned machine that can turn out 3,000 meals a month. It’s all possible with the help of the board, Kali Vasanthan, Kumar Iyer, Anisha Nanda and Neha Arorahe, the addition of a full-time chef, Saira Gavidia, and access to the industrial-sized kitchen and pantry of the Pavilion at Bean Tree donated by developer David Gregory. But, fundamentally, this is a story about how one woman, who admittedly creates Agile systems for a living, just decided to get it done.
Devina and her two brothers and one sister were brought up in India where she says, “I saw hunger firsthand.... I come from a family where we're very fortunate to be on the other side of hunger, and my parents never took that lightly.” Growing up, hers was the kind of home where the homeless and disabled would come by and announce that 20 of them would be coming by for lunch. “So, my parents would have these lavish meals made. My job was to serve them and make sure they were enjoying their meal."
When she moved to the United States, she often volunteered in her local soup kitchen. When she moved to Loudoun County five years ago, she found it odd that there wasn’t one. “No one is going to convince me that there isn’t hunger over here... I know there is,” she said, “so I’m just going to have to start one.”
She began by reaching out to the area’s food pantries to develop partnerships so the food would get to people with whom these organizations already had relationships. “It didn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel,” she explained. She first tapped volunteers to collect food from farmers markets and supermarkets and food pantries. She applied for and received grants from local groups like 100 Women Strong. And, she set up a system that began with food prep on Monday and distribution Tuesday through Friday.
Meeting David Gregory was a milestone because it allowed the group to move from a very small kitchen to a world-class facility where it could more easily reach pockets of poverty in Sterling and southern areas of the county at scale. The kitchen always needs donations to pay for food and food containers, for access to farm fresh produce in the winter months and to grow its capacity to more than 5,000 meals a month.
The kitchen’s motto is, “No one should go to bed hungry,” but Devina's side missions are to engage more young people and businesses to help meet the needs in the county, letting them know, “it’s easy to do good if you want to do good.” To donate or volunteer visit https://www.dullessouthsoupkitchen.org/.