Over 4,000 celebrate Thanksgiving at Fall Feast 2011

On Thanksgiving Day, Cincinnatians showed their genorosity by helping to feed more than 6,000 people, they didn't know,
a traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner with all the trimmings plus entertainment for the kids and health screenings and flu shots for adults.

That was all part of the annual "Fall Feast" celebration at the Duke Energy Convention Center downtown on Thanksgiving Day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Hundreds of individuals and families arrived early, lining up patiently outside the upper west ballrooms at the Convention Center waiting for doors to open and Thanksgiving to be served.

The event has grown considerably every year since it was started. Fall Feast chairperson Erin Klotzbach says she remembers the first year the event started when only a handful of volunteers showed up and over 800 people were served. This year, over 4,000 were served at the Duke Energy Center, with over 2,500 dinners being sent to soup kitchens and shelters all over the Tri-State and Southwest Ohio.

Even more impressive, Fall Feast 2011 had over 900 volunteers. So many applied that the group's website had to put the word FULL in red letters in the volunteer section of the website.

Early Thanksgiving morning, volunteers were busy cutting pie slices, taking salad out of huge bags and putting them into small serving cups as well as roasting turkey, cooking green beans and other vegetables. By 11:30, the first 'guests', as they are called by the volunteers, sat down in the huge ballroom, and volunteer servers starting to bring out large trays of salad and bread for the first course of the Thanksgiving Dinner.

Denise Simmons brought her 2 daughters and baby son to the event for the first time on Thursday. She had just heard about it and says she was very impressed, and not just with the Thanksgiving Dinner she and her family got. Simmons says she loved the games her daughters got the play and the face painting they were offered.

Simmons says she was even more impressed by something else. She tells 9 News, "the different diversities that are down here that I see. I think that is awesome. You see different diversities down here and not just one group and that is a good thing." In deed, you didn't have to look hard around the ballroom to see very racially mixed, aged mixed and outlook mixed groups spending Thanksgiving together.

The mother of three says he was quite surprised to see how many volunteers gave up their Thanksgiving to help out others. Simmons adds, "But now I know know they care a lot."

Volunteer Leslie Greene came all the way from her new home in Charlotte, North Carolina to help. After recently relocating there, she is coming back home to Cincinnati to spend the holiday with family. Since they're set, she decided to help out at the Fall Feast to spread her Thanksgiving joy with others. Greene says, "I think it makes me feel good. It makes me feel I am doing what I am supposed to be doing here."

Fall Feast organizers also praised local corporations to stepping forward with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations of food and time to make the Thanksgiving dinners and celebration possible.

In addition to the Thanksgiving dinner, over 1200 coats and other winter wear were distributed to those in need. There were a number of games for children to play, including a huge indoor inflatable slide and a petting zoo. There was also a health clinic and a barber shop as well as free flu shots.

Chairperson Klotzbach says her one disappointment was many people from outside Cincinnati said they wanted to come but could not because they could not afford to make it to downtown Cincinnati. Even after giving out bus fares for days, many requests came in too late to get help. She says that's something her group and others will consider when they start planning for next year's Fall Feast.   

 All proceeds will go toward events organized by Give Back Cincinnati, which is the prime organizer of Fall Feast along with the City Gospel Mission.

For more information about the event, go to http://www.givebackcincinnati.org/v3/events_details.asp?EventID=1439 .