Diane Bousquet ladles out homemade soup into Styrofoam cups, carefully balancing a bun on top. For the past year, she’s done this every weekend with her initiative Warming Souls with Soup.
Volunteers, friends, and community members dropped by Saturday afternoon to eat, sing and reflect on the group’s one-year anniversary. Warming Souls cooks hot meals and delivers hampers to community members across the city, a project Bousquet says began in the wake of tragedy.
“For the last seven plus years, I’ve been journeying back to my roots,” she said, “and along this journey I have started to advocate for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People. And it brought me to Brady Road Landfill last year.”
The landfill was the site of protests after the provincial Progressive Conservative government stated it would not support a search of the Prairie Green landfill for the remains of two murdered Indigenous women. Jeremy Skibicki, who was found guilty in their slayings and two others, admitted the crimes were racially motivated and that he singled out vulnerable women.
“We know that he was targeting the ladies at shelters in the city,” said Bousquet, “and we realized that just being in that generalized location just puts a target on their backs.”
Bousquet met Elizabeth Treidler at the blockade and said they “instantly clicked.” They felt called to help the community, but didn’t know what would make the biggest impact.
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“And then we decided, you know what? Food is the best way that we can break bread, sit down together and build that foundation and that relationship together and hopefully that we can overcome this crisis that’s going on in Manitoba.
“I believe in fighting for what’s right, but I also believe in creating a solution. And this was our solution.”
Warming Souls with Soup was born. An idea sparked by the protest at the landfill now helps keep food from going there; the ingredients that go into their soups and hampers come from the Leftovers Foundation, Second Harvest, and Humble Harvest, organizations that take good, but unsellable food from grocers and restaurants and distribute it to groups like Bousquet’s.
But in the early days before those partnerships, Bousquet patrolled the streets at night, handing out single meals. Bousquet remembers one encounter that pushed her to expand their reach.
“On one of our night patrols, we came across an old woman. She was in her late 60s and she was going through a BFI bin to try and feed her grandchildren that had recently come into her care,” she said, her voice unsteady. “We started carrying emergency hampers with us so that if we ever came across that incident again, we’d be able to address it in a good way.”
Warming Souls formed a partnership with Sunshine House, using their space to cook and store food in exchange for cooking a meal for their Mobile Overdose Prevention Site. Bousquet says a typical Saturday begins around 8 a.m. and finishes after delivering food to people on the streets around 2:30 a.m. the next morning. She estimates the team, which has grown to nine volunteers, has distributed about 1,000 hampers and served 3,000 meals in the past year.
One of those volunteers is Meghan Green. She began volunteering for Warming Souls two months ago.
“We go to the North End, sometimes Osborne, West End, Central, because those are where people don’t use shelters.”
Giving back has helped Green, too. She’s been sober for two years and considers volunteering a form of self-help. Being able to help others, she says, shows her how far she’s come in her own journey.
“This is my medicine,” she said. “It helps me. I love this work.”
Bousquet says Warming Souls’ operations are growing. Saturday’s one-year celebration was held at the Manitoba Chilean Association as it provided more space, an opportunity brought forward by Bousquet’s partner Oscar Concha. In the next year, Bousquet plans to look into securing funding and a permanent location.
“It is truly, truly a gift to be able to address a need within our community that is so deep and so profound,” she said.