In part a victim of its own success, Schoharie County's only soup kitchen, the Butterfly Café, is closing.
For now.
Since it opened at the Head Start building in Cobleskill, the not-for-profit Spirit of Hope's Butterfly Café has served a total of more than 16,000 take-out meals.
But Paulette Danforth, who's handled everything from ordering to cleanup to coordinating volunteers to cooking the 150-190 meals the café has dished up every Tuesday evening, is burned out, said Carol McGuire, the organization's leader, and needs a break.
"We're looking at it as just a breather," Ms. McGuire said. "Paulette was a one-man show and it got to be too much; there are other thing she'd like to do. We're looking at this as a chance to figure out a way to do things differently."
Ms. McGuire said they'd looked-unsuccessfully-for someone to take over running the soup kitchen and feel the best option might be to have groups handle the job on a rotating basis.
Another hurdle will be finding a better spot for it.
Head Start administration was comfortable working with a single coordinator, she said, but has some concerns about turning its sometimes-balky kitchen equipment over to lots of different people.
There's also the fact that they need more space, both for diners and for storage.
"We never had a place where people could sit down and share a meal and maybe bond with others going through the same thing," Ms. McGuire said. "That would have been a big plus."
They've talked some with local churches, but none of them have the commercial-sized stoves the Butterfly Café requires to handle the volume of meals it serves.
"We never expected to have this kind of demand," Ms. McGuire said. "We grew from two meals the first night to this.
"We filled a need and helped people with their food budget just by providing a single meal...We could have been open every night, but we didn't have either the time or the money."
Still, Ms. McGuire said it's time-not money-that's forcing the temporary shutdown; churches and others have been so generous with the donations that the café has a balance in its bank account.
"We need to come up with a way to make this more of a cooperative effort and not a one-man show," she said. "The need is there."
Anyone interested in helping reopen the Butterfly Café or who has ideas about possible sites for it can contact Ms. McGuire at 234-7781.