Sandy and Billy Boulanger served roasted turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing and barbecued beef barley stew to dozens of people on the last Saturday of May.
For 14 years, they fed anyone who showed up once a week from noon until 1 p.m. at CenterPoint Church in Concord.
Their last Saturday was a busy one: even those who no longer relied on their generosity came to say goodbye.
It was only supposed to be for the winter of 2012.
The Lark Family Mission, which has since shuttered its doors, was set to discontinue its weekly free lunches for those in need. Worried that the community would otherwise go hungry, volunteers Sandy and Billy offered to take over.
Recently, a church director offhandedly mentioned that they were only expected to serve meals for that one winter. When they kept doing it, nobody thought to say otherwise. Over 700 Saturdays have since gone by.
“No one told us to leave, so we were there for 14 years, basically uninvited,” Billy said.
In that time, the two established a reputation as the unofficial liaisons for the unhoused and lower-income communities in the Concord area.
Week after week, donations turned up on the porch of their farmhouse in Chichester. It was up to them to distribute the food, clothes, toiletries and other supplies.
The miscellaneous ingredients challenged Sandy’s culinary creativity, but it was a muscle she enjoyed training. When she received duck meat one week, she whipped up Peking duck stir fry. When someone dropped off what felt like the thousandth box of pasta, she made lasagna with ricotta cheese. Her pot roast and hand-rolled meatballs have proven fan favorites over the years. Just don’t call her chef, Billy warned.
“I don’t have schooling,” she said, equally shy as her husband is outgoing.
Their nonprofit is called the Corban Center, and it operates under the First Baptist Church in Concord. Sandy chose Corban for its biblical meaning: “a gift from God devoted back to God,” she said.
“We used our God-given talents to be able to do this — I love to cook,” she said.
Billy, meanwhile, brought conversation to the table.
“God gave her the gift of cooking. He gave me the gift of gab,” he said.
But there’s a fine line between talking and prying, and the Boulangers avoid the latter. They never knew the full name of one of their regulars, a man who turned to alcoholism and became homeless after the sudden loss of his wife.
“He just snowballed,” Billy said.
Rodney Moody came to lunch for about 12 years. He died last year.
Plenty of the Saturday regulars were anonymous. The Boulangers didn’t ask questions: they’ve seen other helping ministries push people away that way.
“If they want to volunteer their name, they volunteer their name. If they want to tell their story, they tell their story, but we don’t push it. We’re like, ‘We’re here for you, we love you, here’s great food. You can do better in your life. People care, and if you want to talk, you can talk,’” Billy said.
Sometimes the Boulangers lost their Saturday regulars under tragic circumstances, like Moody. But other times, people moved on from the Corban Center with happier goodbyes.
“We’ve had some people that were homeless and actually got off the street and got apartments,” Sandy said.
They recounted how one formerly unhoused man went from receiving community services to providing them. After he recovered from his heroin addiction, he began working at a faith-based drug rehabilitation facility. Billy and Sandy reunited with him at a church function that hired the organization to serve a meal.
“‘You were on the other side of the table!’” Billy recalled saying to him.
Bill Boulanger gives a speech thanking everyone for the community they built at the Corban Center and listing off the copious amount of food they made for Saturday meals. Credit: ALEXANDER RAPP / Monitor 
Bill and Sandy Boulanger were lauded and embraced by Deborah Eckland, a long-time attendee of the Corban Center. Credit: ALEXANDER RAPP / Monitor
Alexandra Eckersley, who was arrested in 2022, used to attend the Boulangers’ Saturday lunches when she struggled with addiction. One day, she told Billy that she was going to get clean.
“I said, ‘Allie, I bet you won’t,’” Billy said. “And I wanted to lose this bet.”
She relapsed after about a month and eventually lost touch with the Boulangers. But they saw on TV that she’s finally clean, living with her boyfriend and child.
“I guess one of these days, I gotta send her flowers,” Billy said. “She won the bet.”
Sandy started cooking lunch all those years ago because she saw a need in the community that would otherwise go unmet. But now, other organizations have stepped up.
In the past few months, the Boulangers have seen their lowest levels of turnout. Attendees told them that members of the unhoused community have started turning to other resources, like a coalition of volunteers from local churches that gave away food and supplies at Healy Park in Concord.
“We figured, well, the hole is being filled. We’re not going to be abandoning them. And 14 years is quite a while,” Billy said.
So, for the foreseeable future, the Boulangers will spend their Saturdays at home in Chichester rather than at CenterPoint Church.
“They’ve touched a lot of people in 14 years, they’ve touched a lot of hearts,” said Corban Center attendee Frank Horton. “For some of us, it’s not about the food. It’s about the company.”
They plan to finish up Sandy’s farm stand, if they can ever get through all the donations that are still left on their porch daily.
“It’s hard to tell people to stop dropping stuff off unless I see them again,” Sandy said.
Though their meal services are over, Billy and Sandy will continue to coordinate the distribution of clothing and supplies. They plan to still be a reliable point of contact for people looking to help their lower-income neighbors.
“If people need help, they know they can reach out to us, and other organizations come to us if they know somebody in need,” Billy said.
