This week's personality: Robin Hughes heads Methodist community meals project

Since February 2019, the United Methodist Church of Loudonville has served free community meals on the first and third Mondays of the month, even holidays.

That commitment increased this year to the fifth Monday whenever there are five in the month.

The central figure behind the meals is Robin Hughes, who was inspired to make the effort through an experience far earlier in life.

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“In 2018, I brought up the idea of community meals at a church planning meeting,” Hughes said. “I had been volunteering with Helping Hand (a Loudonville-based community help organization), and through that work saw that many people in the community needed help. Our church approved hosting the meals, and we served our first in February of 2019.”

Hughes said she had some experience serving meals to groups, when she and others served dinners for the Lions Club in her former hometown of Bangor, Pennsylvania, a decade or more earlier.

“I vividly remember when I was a struggling young mother with two little boys there were times when we had nothing but rice and beans in our cupboard,” Hughes said. “Dinsmore Stockdale, at the time the head of Helping Hand who had been my fourth grade teacher, gave me a certificate for the local grocery store to help us through a hard time. I never forgot that gesture, and the meals are the way I repay it.”

The church initially served its meals in Fellowship Hall, bringing in as many as 50. The program was disrupted in March 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We had to figure out a different way to serve the meals, since serving them in the Fellowship Hall was no longer an option,” she said.

The solution was to serve the meals carryout style, with “runners” taking the order at the curb beside the church. They would take it inside where packers put the orders in carryout bags, and the runner would bring the meals back out to the cars.

“Very unexpectedly, demand for our community meals grew,” Hughes said. “Our record was 147 Thanksgiving meals served on the Monday before Thanksgiving, 2021, closely followed by a lasagna dinner served the Monday before the 2021 Loudonville Free Street Fair. We are averaging 100 meals served every Monday.”

How to get a free meal at United Methodist Church of Loudonville

The meals are free to anyone that needs one, Hughes said, but donations are happily accepted.

“Donations allow us to improve the quality of the meals we prepare,” she said. “We are also generously supplemented by donations of both food and money from persons both inside and outside our church.”

Meals can be picked up on North Park Place between Market Street and Pleasant Drive, on the north side of the northeast quadrant of Central Park.

Hughes expresses appreciation for the small and loyal group of church members who prepare and serve the meals. “The meals wouldn’t be possible without them,” she said, adding, “I am the idea person, but some great cooks make the meals happen.”

Hughes said she has noticed that “recently I’ve been seeing new faces getting meals but fewer donations, which tells me the meals now are truly getting to people who need them.”

More about Robin Hughes

Hughes grew up in rural Lakeville, the oldest of three children of Donna and the late Kermit Richert. She graduated from Loudonville High in 1975 and attended Baldwin Wallace College for three years and Ashland University for two more, earning a bachelor’s degree in communications along with a secondary education certificate.

“My intention was to teach,” she said. “But instead I worked at Ashland University for a while, and later at Truax Printing in Loudonville. I finally landed a teaching job at Plymouth High School, where I taught English for one year, and then a job at Clear Fork, where I taught for two. I really enjoyed working with the kids at both schools, but I resented what I felt was pressure to ‘dumb-down’ what I was teaching. I resented being told that it was unreasonable to assign students to read three chapters of 'Huckleberry Finn' while they were on Spring Break. So, I quit.”

She was then hired by the Loudonville Public Library to serve as children’s librarian, working there from 1989-93.

She and Steve Hughes married in 1992, and two years later they moved to the eastern shore of Maryland, where Steve accepted a position at Pintail Point Farm, a large dairy operation.

They remained there until 1999. While in Maryland, Hughes was hired by a Catholic school in the area to serve as the high school librarian.

“They were so happy to have me that they funded me going back to college to earn a library science degree,” she said. “Suddenly I was just like my mother, who was a long-time school librarian in the Loudonville-Perrysville Schools.”

In 1999, Steve took a new job with the Brown Feed Company, serving farm operations in eastern Pennsylvania, and they moved to Bangor “located in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania so close to the Delaware River that we often shopped in nearby New Jersey.”

She was hired there to work as a middle school (grades 6-8) librarian, a position she said she loved, and worked it for nine years. Then she switched jobs, becoming a high school librarian at Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where she worked for seven more years.

They moved back to Loudonville in 2015, in part to be near their new grandchildren. Their intention was to acquire a small farm and build a kind of agricultural education center.

“But because of high land prices that didn’t happen,” she said. “Retired, Steve found himself bored to distraction, but thankfully was called to consider a position at the Agriculture Technical Institute (ATI) in Wooster, the same place he had worked 25 years before. He worked there until three years ago."

Hughes, a lifelong Methodist, said she has always been active in local churches, in Loudonville; Apple Creek; Centerville, Maryland.; and Richmond (near Bangor), Pennsylvania.; and now back in Loudonville and the church where she grew up.

She has two grown sons, Tim (wife Mindy Butterbaugh, a Shreve native), an auto mechanic at a large dealership in Surprise, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix; and Mark (wife Carli Germann, of Loudonville), who live north of Perrysville where they operate a produce farm. They have two sons, Matthew, 10, and Benjamin, 7.

This article originally appeared on Ashland Times Gazette: Robin Hughes heads United Methodist Church of Loudonville meal effort