Scott Stanfield
Record staff
19 Wing Comox has donated $10,000 to the Sonshine Lunch Club, which operates a soup kitchen at St. George’s United Church in Courtenay.
The money was raised through Boomer’s Legacy, a charitable foundation named after Andrew ‘Boomer’ Eykelenboom, a Comox soldier killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan in 2006.
The entire amount will be used to purchase food for the service.
The club serves an average of about 125 guests each day.
“Well over the 3,000 mark in a year,” club president Tom Morgan said. “I’ve known it up as high as 200, but that’s an exception.”
The soup kitchen operates five days a week, run by a different church group each day.
“It’s run thanks to the generosity of this church,” Morgan said. “It’s nicely placed geographically.”
St. George’s is located at Sixth and Fitzgerald in Courtenay. Besides food, the service also offers guests articles of clothing, non-perishable foods and other items free of charge.
“Also this year, we ran a couple of days where we enabled people to register to vote,” Morgan said. “To vote, you have to have a home address, so Elections Canada allowed them to use the church as their home address.”