Donations needed for annual Thanksgiving meal

With slightly more than a month until Thanksgiving, the county's annual banquet is short on funds to feed the community.

For the past four years, organizers have come together to put on the feast. They've fed hundreds of hungry people a meal of turkey, ham, potatoes, corn and other holiday fixings.

The event has become a hub for needy families without the means for their own dinner, single residents without any other place to go and families who like the warmth of eating with a hall full of other people.

But this year, organizers are struggling to come up with the funds to feed all the people expected to come. Organizers of the county's community Thanksgiving dinner are in desperate need for financial support. They project as many as 800 people will show up for the holiday meal, up more than 100 from 2011.

With just five weeks to go before the dinner, their effort has collected $2,500 for the meal. That's less than one-third of the $8,000 needed to adequately feed all of those people, organizer LaTheda Noonan said.

"We do not have enough money to put the banquet on. The sense is that the need is up, so we are really hurting," she said.

The banquet was started in 2008 in response to a growing need in the community due to the economic downturn, Noonan said. Organizers set out to feed as many people as they could with whatever money they could bring in.