SAN ANTONIO – The nonprofit known for delivering meals to San Antonio area homebound residents, Meals on Wheels San Antonio, intends to move into its $23 million new location by Thanksgiving, or by the end of the month.
“This building was really built by the community,” Forrest Myane, chief strategy and development officer for Meals on Wheels San Antonio said.
The new 44,000 square foot building, located off of Nacogdoches Road just outside of Loop 410, was made possible mainly by donations.
“We have money from the city bond and we have money from Meals on Wheels that we put in from our reserves and from selling some properties that that we had. But we raised about $12 million from the community to put towards this project. So that’s tremendous” Myane said.
Myane added that even though the groundbreaking for the new location happened last year, it has been years in the making.
”We purchased this property in 2018. But we’ve been planning, we’ve been thinking about a new building for a lot longer than that. We’ve outgrown our space that we moved into in the mid-nineties probably ten years ago,” she said.
The kitchen alone is bigger than the nonprofit’s old building. Now, they are going to be able to produce 30,000 meals a day, versus the 10,000 meals Meals on Wheels was presently making in their old building.
Mayne said the long-term ability to have more volunteers in the building and increase the number of meals made in the future is crucial to the organization. She said the number of seniors only continues to increase.
”We know that seniors came out of COVID a little worse off than they were before. So the population of people who need our services is bigger proportionately than it was pre-COVID. And it’s just going to be more, there’s just more people that need support and help. So the kitchen’s going to be amazing,” she said.