WATERVILLE — Five days a week, Heather Libby gets a hot meal at the Waterville Area Soup Kitchen.
Libby, 36, lives at the local homeless shelter and is on a waiting list for housing. She’s worked construction and done inventory, but she doesn’t have a driver’s license and has had trouble finding a job.
When the shelter closes during the day, she and others need a place to go. The soup kitchen is that place.
“Without this place a lot of us wouldn’t eat or have a warm place to go,” Libby said. “This place means a lot to everyone.”
Libby is one of about 400 people who benefit each day from food served by the kitchen. Doors open in the morning for light snacks, followed by a hearty lunch.
Wednesday’s menu featured shepherd’s pie, bread and dessert.
When the kitchen started serving meals in November 2020, they offered food at four different locations in the city. In May 2022, they moved into the building on College Avenue so they could serve sit-down meals, said Carla Caron, executive director of the soup kitchen.
That first day, they served 52 meals. Now the average is between 400 and 500 meals a day, many of them takeout.
In October, the soup kitchen purchased the building, the fulfillment of a goal to ensure that they could continue to serve the most vulnerable.
“It’s been a long-time dream of ours to be able to have a permanent home for our community,” Caron said.
Moving forward, the goal is to continue to serve meals while adding other services like a dentist, doctor and counselor. Caron said for many, dental care is a particular challenge, because without healthy teeth, it’s difficult to eat even basic foods.
“We would like to be a soup kitchen that brings services in where our people are comfortable to be able to get treatment either for mental health, substance use disorder,” Caron said. “Many of our people suffer from a lot of PTSD, a lot of chronic mental health issues.”
For others, it’s a matter of economics.
“We have a lot of people that run out of funds before they run out of month,” she said. “We have veterans, we serve families. It’s not just the unhoused population. It goes far beyond that.”
As Caron served coffee and took to-go orders, volunteers assembled the shepherd’s pie in the kitchen.
One of them was Laura Corbett of Belgrade.
“I love to volunteer with the community, and this is a great group of people,” Corbett said.
Two days a week, Dean Dolham of Oakland serves as chef, pulling recipes from a military cookbook designed to serve large groups. As of last week, they had served 100,000 meals in 2025.
Dolham also serves as president of the soup kitchen board of directors. Area businesses donate a lot of the food, from dented cans to produce that needs to be used ASAP.
“We handle a lot of ‘it doesn’t look pretty’ but our volunteers are real good at cleaning it up,” he said. “We serve a lot of fresh salads and fruits as much as we can.”
Outside, a large mural covers the side of the building, showing an ocean scene with a lighthouse, a sailboat and the words “healing, compassion, hope and kindness.”
Libby said she wants the community to know that those who lack permanent housing are like everyone else — just trying to get by.
“We’re not all as bad as people may think the homeless are, honestly,” Libby said. “We’re just trying to survive day by day and without the Lighthouse we’d have no place to eat, no place to be warm.”
