Meet Soup Kitchen Manager Anne Gill

Part-time Soup Kitchen Manager Anne Gill cleans and prepares produce.

Every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday you can see an enormous white pickup truck, embellished with pink hubcaps and a license plate that reads, “Sassy,” roll into the Project Host parking lot. Out steps a small-statured woman with short-cropped white hair, and you can’t help but be intrigued, and maybe even a little confused.

While at first glance you might think Soup Kitchen Manager Anne Gill is a bit mismatched to her vehicle, give her five minutes of your time, and soon you’ll see that she’s got all the personality and chutzpah you’d expect from someone driving that truck.

Anne’s fierce independence, determination, and pragmatism that help her succeed in running a tight ship alongside partner Cathy Moore in the Soup Kitchen are characteristics that have shaped the course of her entire life. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and started working for Bell, the telephone company, straight out of high school. “I wanted to go to nursing school, but I didn’t have the resources for that, so I starting working.”

Anne got married, moved to Florida, and kept working for Bell, and then—after the company split—she stayed on at AT&T, where she retained her seniority and made peace with the fact that nursing school was no longer in her future. Fast-forward to a 21-year career and two kids later: Anne received the news that AT&T was going to downsize and relocate. For employees who didn’t want to move, like Anne, AT&T was offering to pay for their education.

“I said, ‘Yes! This is my chance [to pursue nursing]! I’m 38 years old, and I don’t know if I can still absorb anything in school,’ so I started just doing a few classes while working. It took me about five years to get through the program, but it worked out fine, and it was all paid for.”

Anne and her two kids moved to Gainesville, Georgia, where she worked in a hospital system for 10 years. It was following her son and first grandchild that ultimately brought Anne to the Greenville area, but she only worked here for about two years before she got the itch to live elsewhere. Anne was able to leverage her work to see more of the country through travel nursing. She packed up her RV (in the meantime, she’s on her fifth such vehicle), drove west, and lived and worked in Arizona and California for another roughly 10 years.

All told, Anne worked for 25 years as a nurse, and that second career prepared her well for how she would spend her retirement: first, as a caretaker for her son, whose declining health ultimately brought her back to Greenville, and now as Soup Kitchen Manager at Project Host.

“My son was very sick. He was here in South Carolina, and it made me want to come home. He has a kidney disorder, and at that particular time he and his girlfriend had broken up, and he didn’t have anyone. He was in the hospital all the time, and I said, ‘I need to go home.’”

Anne spent the early years of her retirement seeing her son back to better health and also checking off all the projects she’d planned to take care of around the house as a retiree. It turns out the latter enterprise didn’t take nearly as long as expected: “Those projects took like three months, and then I was done! I thought, ‘Okay, I finished all that, now what am I going to do?’”

Anne Gill accepts a donation.

It was then that Anne decided to volunteer at Project Host. She tried out each day of the week to see which would be a good fit and landed on Tuesdays and Fridays. Anne volunteered regularly for about two years, but then the pandemic hit, and Project Host sent all volunteers home. Not one to sit around, Anne worked for the 2020 Census, going door to door to ensure that people filled out their surveys. Once that was over, Anne was ready for the next project, and that’s when the Soup Kitchen Manager position at Project Host presented itself, and she went for it.

Even though Anne knew the ropes in the Soup Kitchen from her time as a volunteer, switching to a managerial position was not without its challenges:

“I think there had been some different managerial styles [prior to me], and it was a learning process for the volunteers and for me. I came from a real structured background with nursing, and so I had to step back a little bit and say, ‘Okay, it doesn’t have to be only my way.’ I had to learn to be open to suggestions.”

Still, Anne and partner Cathy did bring a great deal of structure to the Soup Kitchen, particularly in the form of organizing the food that is donated to Project Host. “We are making sure we are utilizing what comes in. It’s being offered for our guests, so we try to not waste anything, and we know where things are.”

Also, given her nursing background, Anne is particularly keen on following food safety guidelines, as well as offering a balanced meal. Her training also comes into play when interacting with guests. “There have been several times where I have had to step in and put the nurse hat on—call 911, or do something as simple as putting on a Band-Aid.”

A year into her job, Anne has been thrown a new curveball with the current Soup Kitchen renovations. She and Cathy had to devise a plan for how to continue meal service while their workspace was completely gutted. Four weeks in, the two haven’t missed a beat and have guided volunteers smoothly through the transition. And the inconvenience is definitely worth it in Anne’s eyes:

“The kitchen is going to be beautiful. I’m so looking forward to being in there and cooking. Once the dining room renovation is done too, I think it’s going to be such a pleasant environment—a lot more warm and friendly for folks to come in and have a good meal.”

When asked if, looking ahead, there is anything more Anne would like to accomplish in the Soup Kitchen, she lives up to the “Sassy” promise of her pickup truck plates. “Not really,” she says, “but I need a vacation at some point.” Knowing Anne’s constant need for a project and to bring structure and order to the chaos around her, though, we’re confident she’ll cook up some new plans for our operation soon.

By Claudia Winkler