Wrapping Up 2025: A Year of Showing Up, Stirring the Pot, and Building What Lasts

As we wrap up 2025, I keep coming back to one simple truth: this year was about showing up.

Showing up for our participants. Showing up for each other. Showing up for our city, with soup, with skill-building, with advocacy, and sometimes with hot cocoa on a cold bike bus morning.

We opened our first-ever public-facing café at Glisan Landing in Montavilla, and with it, a whole new chapter for Stone Soup PDX. The café has created meaningful, real-world learning opportunities for our participants, while also giving our community a place to gather, connect, and eat truly delicious food (which, yes, we are very proud of).

We launched our Emerging Leaders Board, welcoming new voices and energy into our organization and helping shape the future of Stone Soup PDX. And then, because we don’t do things halfway, we hosted our first-ever Soup Cook-Off. Bringing together some of Portland’s best chefs, our staff, board, and supporters, it was joyful, loud, nourishing, and deeply affirming. It was also a powerful reminder of what’s possible when community partnerships come together in support of people navigating food, housing, and income insecurity.

And that’s just the highlight reel.

Behind the scenes, the impact has been real and measurable:

• We increased the number of participants in our program, with an 83% graduation rate, something our team and participants worked incredibly hard to achieve.

• Each week, Stone Soup PDX prepares and delivers over 1,700 nutritious meals to shelters and community organizations across Portland.

• In 2025 alone, we prepared more than 80,000 meals while supporting 79 participants on their path toward stable employment.

  
  

We also invested deeply in how we train. This year, we launched a brand-new curriculum designed to be scaffolded and progressive, lessons that build on one another, reinforce skills through repetition, and intentionally introduce new competencies along the way. The goal is simple and ambitious: make sure our participants are truly workforce-ready when they graduate.

To strengthen that work even further, we added surveys and evaluations so we can clearly demonstrate that our training works and that it leads to jobs. We received a grant to hire an Employment Specialist, allowing us to more thoughtfully match participants with employers, not just any job, but long-term, stable employment that supports real life stability. We expanded our curriculum again by adding a baking program (which explains why the café smells amazing), and now our participants are making all of the baked goodies you enjoy when you stop by.

And yes, we made it through uncertain funding times. We kept going. We stayed loud about our mission. And we were recognized with multiple grants that affirmed the value of this work and the strength of our model.

We also put ourselves out there in every way we could:

• Serving hot cocoa along Bike Bus routes.

• Showing up to neighborhood association meetings.

• Advocating for the county to continue funding workforce training.

• Hosting cooking demos at potential partner sites.

• And, occasionally, yelling (lovingly and loudly): We are here. We are Stone Soup.

None of this happens without people.

I am endlessly grateful for our staff, for their skill, their care, their creativity, and their refusal to give up on one another or on our participants. I’m grateful to our board for their leadership and steady guidance, to our donors for trusting and investing in this work, and to our volunteers who show up again and again because they believe food and opportunity change lives.

As we move into 2026, I’m carrying deep gratitude for our participants, our team, our supporters, and this community that continues to show up in big and small ways.

2025 gave us so much to be proud of. And 2026? We’re ready.

[Stone Soup PDX builds economic stability for people facing barriers to employment through hands-on culinary training and our community meals program. To learn more about our mission, visit our website at www.stonesouppdx.com]