When Maren Faye (pronounced Mah-ren Fi-ya) arrived at the Peace House interview for a part-time position coordinating a free meal in Ashland in 2011, she couldn’t have known that a decade later it would still be at the center of her life. Whether she’s cooking in the recently-updated kitchen at the Methodist Church, picking up food donations, coordinating her team, or roasting tomatoes at home, Maren lives and breathes Uncle Food’s Diner in 2021.

When she first took the job, she did it for income. But within the first few months, Maren realized that there was something more than a job at Uncle Food’s, and with volunteer cooks, she couldn’t control everything about the food being prepared.

“It wasn’t about me anymore,” she said. “It was about serving the people.”

Before Maren, Uncle Food’s produced simple dinners for limited crowds, and while the weekly meal had been functioning as a critical source of food for those in need for more than 20 years, the kitchen often ran out before everyone could be served. To be ‘more than just a soup kitchen,’ and offer healthy, abundant meals, community partnerships with Ashland’s Community Food Bank and Pamala Joy’s long-sustained project, Food Angels became even more important.

“We learned that we could make it work, to have healthy food for everyone, often with enough to take home leftovers,” she said. “I saw communities pull together to make that happen.”

Community support seems to be a common thread during in the past ten years surrounding Maren’s work coordinating the free meals. The Tuesday Uncle Food’s Diner event came to mean a gathering of familiar faces — some without homes, some without kitchens, children and the elderly, all coming together to share a delicious and healthy meal.

“Once I fed the same people each week, I started to care about them, and their well-being, like my own family,” she said. “You feed your family. You care about their well-being. You care about their lives.”

As a mother of three and accomplished catering chef, Maren knew how to take care of people. Each Tuesday, and four days per week for the past 20 months, Maren has led a team of cooks in handcrafting dishes from cuisines around the world — and aligning them with people’s dietary needs. This includes offering plant-based options and preparation of special meals for those with allergies. Nearly all of the food comes from donations, which vary each week.

“We never know what we are going to get, so we make what we have, work. I don’t know exactly how, but it always works out,” she said.

During Maren’s tenure, the Methodist Church, Peace House, the Community Foodbank, and La Clinica teamed up to make what the Methodist Church calls Community Tuesday: Open Hearts a success. Each week, as Maren wrangled volunteers and made enough food for at least 100 people, the La Clinica trailer would pull up and offer health services, counselors would offer listening services, and nurses would tend to the feet of those who lived outside.

Maren reflected fondly about an inspiring conversation, a couple years into working with the program, when she received guidance from her friend Dorita Betts Borgerson, a minister at the Methodist Church.

“At a time when I was questioning the mission of our work, Dorita offered me insight that has carried me through the years,” she said. “When we choose to serve, we don’t get to choose who we serve.”

That advice fueled Maren’s commitment to food justice: assuring that everyone in our community has access to fresh, healthy meals.

Her journey during these past ten years shifted from looking at her cooking job as a way to make ends meet into passionate service through heartfelt care for people without enough to eat.

“The people we serve, the people who donate the food, and those who help prepare and package it — they are all like my family. I will continue to care for them as long as we can keep making it work.”

Peace House extends a strong salute of gratitude to Maren for her tireless hours of labor in the kitchen, and for her continued creativity in leadership, with the results speaking for themselves. Even amid COVID, and the tragic fires last year in the Rogue Valley, Maren has shown up to the task: nearly 50,000 meals have been delivered to people in need since January, 2020.