There’s a group of volunteers cooking up a storm every weekend at the Neighbourhood Resource Centre (NRC) on Gore Street.
It’s an ongoing labour of love for the group of people known as ‘No Strings Attached.’
“Every weekend we have the basic food for people, and we give out a lot of food,” said Darwin Nicholson, as he watches volunteers make breakfast for the people coming into the NRC on Easter Sunday. “This is what we do every single Sunday, and we’ve been doing that for over a year and a half now.”
The group origin’s can be traced back to a home bible study group that was active for eight years. Then, on Christmas eve of 2016 - with bags of lunches and a hot chocolate dispenser in tow - volunteers took to the streets of Sault Ste. Marie to hand out food, no questions asked.
“We used to go to church, but our church now is here,” Nicholson said.
No Strings Attached would soon move into the NRC, where the group now brings its donated food items in order to feed people.
“A lot of people here don’t get their cheques until the end of the month, and by the third week of the month, they come in here and they got no food,” Nicholson said. “There’s nothing.”
“We can bring all the food we want, and that’s what we do, and it’s all free.”
Walking into the large room at NRC known as the ‘other side,’ people are greeted by dozens of bags of potatoes. Pallets of food are brought to NRC regularly by a food relief mission from Manitoulin Island, bringing 200 to 300 loaves of bread at a time. Just recently, the group got a shipment containing about 1500 to 1600 jars of peanut butter.
Nicholson says that No Strings Attached has received between $20,000 and $30,000 worth of food donations within the past six weeks.
“There’s people around here starving,” said Nicholson. “We’ve seen so many people starving, and nobody’s got no food.”
As a group of people perform live gospel music in the NRC, No Strings Attached volunteer Ted Barnes says that the group feels that it can persevere, and even flourish, without becoming a registered organization or aligning itself with the church.
“We just don’t think a light bill and property taxes and all this stuff is important when you got people in our own city, and you got all these churches sending people to different countries for missions,” Barnes said. “There’s a mission right here in the Sault, and it’s your neighbour.”
Barnes readily admits that he, like Nicholson, suffered from substance abuse issues at one point in his life. He was homeless at one time, and uses that experience to empathize with some of the people who come into the NRC.
“We’ve been down that road, so we have an idea of what they need,” Barnes said. “Unfortunately with what’s going on with the drugs they’re taking today, it’s a lot different from when we were younger.”
“The stuff they’re taking today, you don’t even know what’s in it.”
“We want to give love, understanding and compassion to these people,” Nicholson continued. “I was a drug addict, alcoholic and I did a lot of things when I was a kid.”
“If you don’t understand the people and you try to work in this area, it doesn’t work out.”
The smell of ham and eggs begin to permeate the NRC as more and more people wander in from Gore Street.
For No Strings Attached this place is their church, and the people who come to eat and socialize here are who they serve.
“Not one penny is paid for a light bill, not one penny’s paid for rent, not one penny pays an employee,” Barnes said. “It all goes back to the people that need it.”
“This is Sault Ste. Marie, nobody should be going hungry.”