St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Hillsboro is bringing back its Soup’s On program this month to provide free meals to serve those who are food insecure.

The first dinner will be served Saturday, Feb. 25 between 5 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. in the Parish of the church on the East North Street entrance to the church, which is located at 234 N. High St. in Hillsboro.

The longtime program is resuming after being closed down for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Before COVID started, we have had a Soup’s On program for a long, long time, and once a month we would provide a free meal for anybody who wanted to come in — a hot meal,” said Maggie Hatfield, the church’s administrative secretary. “We had a lot of homeless people at that time, and during COVID we shut everything down, so they would like to get it going again.”

The program will continue to operate monthly on the last Saturday of every month.

“It was shut down as soon as they started putting out the guidelines where you couldn’t gather because we follow the Diocese guidelines here at St. Mary’s, and they sent us notifications that we couldn’t do it,” said Hatfield.

A different meal will be served each month. This month’s meal will be spaghetti. “It will be spaghetti and either some kind of fruit or salad to go with it,” said Hatfield. “It will be a hot meal, and we try to do healthy meals.”

The meals will be prepared by church volunteers. “Barb Zumwalde heads up the committee, and then different volunteers will come in here to the church where we have a fully operational kitchen, and they prepare it here,” said Hatfield.

Reach John Hackley at 937-402-2571.