News spread quickly in the early morning hours of the deaths of four Lakewood police officers at a coffee shop in Parkland on Nov. 29 and Ginger Passarelli immediately offered the help of The Soup Ladies.
“I called one of the duty officers in Lakewood,” Passarelli said. “I asked if they needed us. They called me back and said, ‘Yes, we need you.’”
It wasn’t long before Passarelli and another Soup Lady were at the coffee shop, feeding the throngs of law enforcement personnel who had arrived to help in any way they could.
During the next nine days, about 25 Soup Lady volunteers helped prepare and serve food, and for their efforts Pierce County is recognizing the organization with its Group of the Year award at its 32nd Annual Volunteer Recognition Brunch.
“We fed people (on Nov. 29) until we ran out of food,” Passarelli said. “Then we went back to the restaurant and made more food.”
She called on one of the Souper Dudes, the nickname for male volunteers, to come and hook up the mobile kitchen trailer to its truck and then “we took the trailer to Lakewood and we set up there and we stayed there for the next eight or nine days.”
“We put out hundreds of people a day,” Passarelli said. “One of the beauties of the community giving us a tool to work with (the mobile kitchen) is that it allowed us to do exactly what we were supposed to do.”
A few weeks later, The Soup Ladies were called to Eatonville, after two officers were shot while responding to a domestic violence call.
“We got a call around 9:30 or 10 at night to go to Eatonville,” Passarelli said. “We went out and fed about 100 people.”
From there, The Soup Ladies provided support by taking food to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where Pierce County Sheriff’s deputy Kent Mundell was on life support following the incident.
“We continued to take food to Harborview … to feed the Mundell family and all of the officers who were there to visit and just check on their friend, co-worker and brother,” she said.
Later she was asked by one of the Pierce County deputies to provide Christmas Dinner to the Mundell family and Passarelli said they were happy to “try and make it a little easier for them on that day.”
“Harvey and I just went and took the food down and set it up,” she said. “We just made sure they had everything that they needed.”
For this service, The Soup Ladies were nominated by Tom Sharp from Pierce County’s Emergency Management department, according to Lin Spellman, who chairs the Pierce County Government Volunteer Recognition Brunch which is set for 9 a.m., Saturday, March 20, at Tacoma’s Landmark Convention Center.
“This is one of the top awards,” Spellman said. “There’s 4,000 volunteers in Pierce County government. They were chosen out of a large group.”
There were 10 groups nominated for the award and Spellman said it is significant that The Soup Ladies were chosen.
The committee that selects the winners said of The Soup Ladies, “The food they serve provides nutrition for the body, but the smiles and compassion with which it is served provides nutrition to the spirits of those working in such times of stress.”
Passarelli said The Soup Ladies were honored to receive such recognition.
“It’s a privilege and an honor to be able to serve,” she said. “To get recognized for it is like icing on the cake. We’re not out there to get awards but it’s nice that someone is noticing the hard work.”
