Elgin homeless being housed at hotel being fed with food pantry donations, soup kettle meals

The homeless living at an Elgin hotel this winter are being fed with meals donated by local soup kettles and groceries supplied by food pantries and local donors, officials said.

The effort is being coordinated by the city of Elgin, Food for Greater Elgin, Elgin Township, and community nonprofits and volunteers to assist the 50 people relocated earlier this year ​from a tent city along the Fox River to the Lexington Inn & Suites​ in Elgin.

City money is being used to pay for the hotel rooms but the food provided to the residents is coming from a variety of sources, in part because the hotel is too far from the places where the residents had once obtained meals.

Among the volunteers who’s been helping is Greg Schiller, a homeless advocate who started gathering food donations after realizing there was a need.

Schiller was manning the hotel pantry one recent evening when Alex Ramirez came by to get some food. Schiller gave Ramirez a plastic container with chili mac, a piece of bread and utensils. An Elgin Township volunteer had delivered the soup kettle meal to the makeshift food pantry set up in the hotel’s lounge area only minutes earlier.

Ramirez has been at hotel since the city last month shut down tent city and started efforts to level and clear the site. Earlier in the day, he had received a box of food from Food for Greater Elgin.

“Everyone is eating. No one is hungry anymore,” said Ramirez, speaking in Spanish. He called it a “huge blessing.”

The original plan had been to transport people to soup kettles but city officials later decided bringing meals to the hotel was “the most effective approach to ensure consistent access to food,” said Jena Hencin, the city’s homeless response coordinator.

Elgin Township Supervisor Ken Bruderle has been making soup kettle meal deliveries to the hotel in addition to recruiting volunteers and coordinating their efforts.

There was an issue early on where no one was at the hotel to distribute the meals, which meant some people ended up taking more than one.

To ensure fair distribution, a system was put in place to “guarantee that only hotel residents have access to the meals and that each individual receives one meal per distribution, ensuring that all residents have access to daily meals,” Hencin said.

As a result of the initial confusion, “people were going without food. People were not eating for days,” Schiller said. “The food plan didn’t work.”

He worked with Hencin to create a food pantry at the hotel and went on radio station WRMN-AM (1410) and social media to get donations coming in, he said.

Food for Greater Elgin also started raising funds to provide food with a goal of collecting $6,000, about half of which they received in just a few days, Executive Director Andres Diez said.

The agency is now providing food boxes to every homeless person at the hotel, he said. The boxes contain 30 to 40 pounds of food, which is supplemented by 100 meals a week that residents can microwave, Diez said.

“It was a work in progress in the beginning. Now everything is very well organized,” Bruderle said.

While Schiller says the “food issue is resolved,” he’s not relenting in his efforts to keep food donations coming in, he said. The donation drop-off location he’s set up is at Hernandez Law Office, 112 N. Spring St. in downtown Elgin.

“I want to keep this pantry going, just in case,” Schiller said.

He added that he commends the city for the actions taken to help the homeless.

“Legally, they owned the property (that) tent city was on,” Schiller said. “The people on that property had no right to be there. The city had the right to take it back. They weren’t obligated to do anything for these people. They could’ve kicked them off the land and said bye.”

Hencin said pulling such a large-scale relocation and housing effort together is no small feat.

“With a project of this scale, unforeseen challenges are inevitable,” she said. “Our strong collaboration with community partners allows us to respond swiftly and effectively to concerns from residents staying at the hotel, ensuring that their needs are met efficiently.”

Gloria Casas is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.