Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - The Buffalo Dream Center readies to, once again, host the local homeless community for a free lasagna dinner and ensure their Christmas Eve is filled with plenty of food and holiday spirit.
The final event of the holiday season for Pastor Eric Johns and the Buffalo Dream Center will be their annual lasagna dinner for the homeless on Wednesday starting at 3 p.m. The dinner will be preceded by music, prizes, and a special message from Pastor Johns this holiday season.
"For many years, the Buffalo Dream Center has worked with the homeless, and we just love so many of them now and know so many of our friends from the streets on a first-name basis. So Christmas Eve is kind of one of those days where people that are on the street are lonely, they're without family, and I think that's why we started it about 25 years ago, doing this Christmas Eve dinner," said Johns in an interview with WBEN. "We started with a big turkey dinner, and after a while we changed to lasagna, and found out that all of our friends from the street love it. They're like, 'Wow, that's so great!' Everything is donated and run by volunteers."
The dinner will attract approximately 200 people from the streets of Buffalo. They will be transported by buses rented by the organizations. Volunteers cooked the lasagna, and will also help serve it to the people in attendance.
The free meal is the result of the combined effort of the Buffalo Dream Center, Hearts for the Homeless, and Friends Feeding Friends.
"All of us organizations pull together to cover all the costs of it. And then all the tables are served by volunteers. Even the lasagna, all the ingredients were donated by Tops and Dash's Market, and the chef cooks it all for free. So it really is a lot of people that pull together every Christmas Eve to to make it special," Johns detailed.
Johns says this event every Christmas Eve is one many homeless people in the city look forward to taking part in.
"When I'm on the street with the homeless during the year, like June or July even, many times I'll have someone walk up to me and say, 'Hey, you still doing that lasagna dinner on Christmas Eve?' So they really look forward to it, and we make it more like a party," Johns noted. "We give away prizes, we sing Christmas carols, one year we had a dance contest. So we have a lot of fun. When you attend, you can tell that just for a couple hours everybody forgets about where they are in life, and that they have to maybe even go back to the street after it's over. They just have a lot of fun, so it's really a good event for people."
The Buffalo Dream Center, along with other Western New York organizations, assisted nearly 4,000 families with food and toys for Christmas. Boxes of Love held many distributions in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, and attracted hundreds of volunteers throughout the months of November and December.
Johns says it takes about 1,000 volunteers every year to help wrap gifts and give out food, and do everything the Buffalo Dream Center does for the community.
"This is our 27th year of running our Boxes of Love program. We started 27 years ago with helping 200 kids with gifts, and then year-after-year it grew and it grew. This year, it looks like when all is said and done, we'll have fed over 2,000 families. We'll have pulled our trucks up into 21 different neighborhoods to do these food distributions, and then we also give away toys to more than 2,000 kids, brand new wrap toys," Johns detailed.
Johns cherishes this time of year to welcome those he's gotten to know in the homeless community, while also welcoming back volunteers that are helping serve those in need during the holidays.
"Some of them, it's like a tradition. We see them on Christmas Eve, and we might not see them for the rest of the year, but that's when they want to bring their family and they want to help with the lasagna dinner," Johns said. "We have always felt, my wife and I, that all the volunteers that come through the Dream Center are just such a big part of what we do, and we've grown fond of a lot of them, become friends with many of them. And we can't do it without them. It's kind of a cliche that Buffalo is a city of good neighbors, but Buffalo really is. There really are people that love others, and want to help and want to serve. So it's been a privilege to work together with all those people."
And while the Christmas Eve dinner is already full for volunteers, Johns says there's always a need for help from the community.
"In January, our mobile food pantry will still be out there feeding over 1,000 families a month. All year long, we have after school programs for kids, we're working with the homeless, our mobile food truck," he noted. "So going to our website, BuffaloDreamCenter.org, it just list the schedule, and we need volunteers all year long to come. And people do, and we encourage people to do that."