By Carla Beecher

About five years before Dan Kopanke retired, he started thinking about what he might like to do next. He always loved cooking, so he enrolled at Kendall College of Culinary Arts and earned a certificate in professional cooking in 2012.

“I wanted to set myself up for a sort of hobby business in my retirement,” said the Our Lady of the Holy Family parishioner. But once he retired from his job of 33 years as a rehabilitation nurse at Rush University Medical
Center in 2017, he found that he really wasn’t interested in cooking for money. So, he and his wife, Kathy, decided to start cooking for the homeless.

The couple set out about three times a week with homemade hot sandwiches to feed the unhoused at the tent city along the Dan Ryan Expressway. “We actually got to know the people living there quite well,” he said. They also organized a parish group that brought 200 meals twice a month to the Franciscan House of Mary and Joseph Chicago, which worked with the Greater Chicago Food Depository and Rush University Medical Center, among others, to provide housing and meals to men and women who had no home. They used the rectory kitchen at Our Lady of the Holy Family to prepare the meals.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, the program was put on hold for almost two years. When businesses started opening up again, they resumed cooking. But instead of delivering meals to people living in tents, they partnered with Love Fridge Chicago, a mutual aid group that places and fills community refrigerators across the city. The refrigerator that Kopanke’s group services is in Pilsen.

Every other Monday, Kopanke sends out an email to interested parishioners, and the first six to respond come to the rectory kitchen for a couple of hours on Saturday to cook 60 meals to deliver later that day.

Kopanke, who also cooks extra meals for some families that are experiencing illness, makes 365 loaves of bread a year in his own kitchen to place in the Love Fridge. “It’s based on the idea of ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’” he said.

Kopanke is now Catholic, but he grew up Protestant and got his initial interest in cooking and helping others from his mom, who was a Salvation Army officer. “She always said, ‘You have to put feet to your prayers.’ It wasn’t enough to pray, you also had to act. That’s also why I became a nurse.

“You can’t just pray to the Lord to help people in need; it’s up to each of us to do the work,” he said. “We actually need to feed people who are hungry.” The parish supplies the funds to buy the ingredients for the Love Fridge meals.

The people who hang out in the plaza near where the Pilsen Love Fridge sits have gotten to know Kopanke’s car. When he drives up to drop off meals, a crowd usually forms, and oftentimes 10 or 15 meals are gone before he can even finish filling the fridge.

“There are many issues that cause stratification of wealth in society,“ he continued. “Mental health plays a huge role, especially for a lot of the guys who hang at the nearby plaza all the time. Speaking as a health professional, I’d say 80 percent of these people have serious mental health issues, making it impossible for them to work or even get into shelters. It’s sobering.

“This is my way of living out my faith,” he continued. His wife feels the same way. “We’re both very committed to it, and it is satisfying. This past week when we dropped off food, we sat in our car for a few minutes and saw a mom and her 10-year-old daughter getting food from the Love Fridge. I actually got a little choked up for a second.

“I just can’t imagine following Christ without doing some sort of corporal ministry,” he said. “People need this.”

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