Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter offers meals, beds, help and hope

When Jeanne first entered an apartment on the fourth floor of the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, it felt like home, for good reason. The view was familiar from decades earlier, when she gazed out the window as a fifth-grader at Sacred Heart School.

Now, the shelter housed in the former school and nearby soup kitchen feed more than young minds. The nonprofit has provided tens of thousands of meals and emergency shelter for people experiencing homelessness; long-term, stable housing as people save to afford a place of their own; and multiple programs to help people prepare to live independently.

“I just don’t know what I would have done if it wasn’t for the Soup Kitchen and Shelter,” said Jeanne, who is 66. “They’re like the beacon in a dark night.”

Jeanne’s dark night started in 2022, when a new landlord raised the rent in an apartment she had called home for 13 years. She couldn’t afford it, and when a new affordable apartment fell through, she found herself on the street.

“I had no place to go, nothing to help me,” she said, until an acquaintance suggested checking out the Soup Kitchen. There, she was fed and provided a bed at an emergency shelter for about a month. She moved to the new shelter at the former school soon after it opened in 2022.

“It was like moving … to a castle,” Jeanne said of the new shelter. She has since moved into her own apartment thanks to the support she received while at the shelter.

The Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, (NSKS), which has served Nashua for nearly 45 years, provides 32 bunkbeds for men and women and 12 units for families in the former school building. It also operates a 22-bed winter overflow shelter there, a soup kitchen one block away serving breakfast and dinner daily on weekdays  and dinner on weekends alongside a food pantry providing fresh produce and non-perishables six days a week, and one Sunday a month. A mobile food pantry slated to begin in 2026 will deliver fresh produce throughout the city. Its Meals for Kids program provides take-home meals for children identified through their   schools as not receiving an evening meal at home.

The top priority is to provide the essentials, said Executive Director Jane Goodman.

“We really are about the basic human needs, and I don’t think you can get much more basic than food and shelter,” she said.

And the organization prides itself on providing much more than a bed.

The NSKS team offers an array of wraparound services, all aimed at helping people experiencing homelessness and hunger navigate barriers to move from day-to-day survival to self-sufficiency.

Services include access to financial literacy classes, resume building, cooking classes (that include crock pots for clients to take with them to new housing) and case management to help people along the way – and for up to six months or a year after they leave the shelter.

NSKS strives to help people in the NSKS apartments and emergency shelter to save money so when they find an apartment of their own, they will be able to afford a security deposit, application fees and any rent higher than federal housing assistance.

“They literally don’t have to spend any money while they’re staying with us,” Jane said of the emergency shelter guests. Food at the soup kitchen and pantry is free and partner organizations offer everything from summer programs for kids, help finding affordable day care so parents can work, free haircuts and thrift store vouchers to buy clothing – both of which help clients feel more confident for job interviews. Tenants in the fourth-floor apartments pay 30 percent of their income for rent.

“They work to get us in a better place, to help,” said Jeanne of NSKS staff. “And that’s what it all comes down to – people helping people.”

Jeanne slept in a shelter bunkbed (in her former second-grade classroom) for 11 months before applying and being accepted to move to the long-term apartment on the fourth floor. She was there for two years, longer than usual, because despite being approved for federal housing assistance, Jeanne searched for months before finding an affordable apartment.

Jane is concerned about the future as the number of people seeking help grows each month.

In fiscal year 2025, NSKS served nearly 27,000 breakfasts, up from 21,000 the previous year, and more than 52,000 dinners, up from 48,000. The number of prepared food boxes and visits to the Food Pantry also increased dramatically.

And with the shelter at capacity nearly every night of the year, “bed nights” (or nights of rest) increased to 24,947 in 2025, from 24,212 in 2024.

With uncertainty about benefits such as SNAP (food assistance) and rising health insurance and healthcare costs, Jane worries that more people will not be able to afford rent and may end up on the street, making NSKS services even more important.

“What I’m most proud of, and what we try to work on the most, is serving people with dignity and respecting that nobody really wants to be in this situation,” she said.

The Foundation is a longtime supporter of the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter, and has provided operating support, funding to address increased demand for food driven by federal budget and benefits changes – and more.

Jeanne said before her rent became unaffordable in 2022, she could not imagine being homeless. She began working as a teenager at various jobs in manufacturing and at hotels, but has had a difficult time finding work since the pandemic ended her last hotel bartending position.

“People think we’re all druggies, all drunks, that we can’t work a day in our life,” she said. “A lot of the people in the shelter are working class people. They have jobs, they just can’t afford to live anymore.”

NKSK Program Manager Josh Ortega agreed. He said he has met people who owned a home for decades, then spiraled into a crisis after paying for costly medication and care for a spouse, running out of money and having a bank foreclose on their mortgage.

“And then they’re in this position,” he said.

His job, he said, is to provide shelter and housing advocacy, with compassion.

“I just picture, if my mom or aunt or sister were in the situation like this, this is the type of help I would want them to have,” he said.

Jeanne said the help made a difference.

“I had a fork in the road,” she said, gesturing with both hands. “I could go this way or that way, and I went this way and it took me right to where I needed to be.  It was right here.”