Elgin man prepares for Have a Heart dinner

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Jeff Turner, owner/operator at In The Neighborhood Deli in Elgin, is shown preparing for the Have a Heart dinner in 2010. Now in its third year, Turner is calling on the community for donations to help feed some 1,200 people on Feb. 12. | File~Sun-Times M

Updated: March 4, 2012 8:09AM

ELGIN — When the cogs in the wheel work together, wonderful things can be done, said Jeff Turner this week as he worked to pull together the third-annual Have a Heart dinner.

“We are just cogs in the wheel that is Elgin,” said Turner. Those cogs, he said, are the volunteers, donors, suppliers and diners who attend one of the four annual dinners he helps orchestrate in Elgin. “I am just the face that gets to take the credit,” he said.

Set for 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Feb. 12 at the Hemmens Cultural Center, 45 Symphony Way, the community dinner is expected to pull more than 800 residents together. Last year, the Have a Heart dinner fed 850 Elginites — more than the previous year’s community Thanksgiving dinner, Turner said.

He’s been coordinating the community Thanksgiving, Have a Heart, and a June and September community cookout for the past four years. After coordinating the Thanksgiving meal the first time, many of those volunteers said it was too bad that Elgin didn’t get together like that more often, Turner said. That idea is what blossomed into his coordinating three more meals each year.

To feed 1,200 people — the turnout he hopes to see for each event — Turner needs to raise $2,600 in food and cash. So far, he has about $300 raised toward Have a Heart but noted that when Elgin residents usually read about the upcoming event in The Courier-News, the donations begin rolling in.

He’s also hoping for an even bigger turnout. The Responsive Mailroom, on Dundee Avenue, is printing 10,000 fliers for Elgin-area elementary schools to pass out to families. A-1 Cab gives the fliers to its customers, too, and Feeding Greater Elgin also will be telling clients there about the event.

“We want everybody to come. We have lots of different demographics of people,” Turner said.

But even if the donations didn’t arrive, he’d find a way to come up with the money himself, Turner said. “I will foot the bill if I have to. I will not let this dinner not happen.”

The events give him so much personal satisfaction that he’ll do everything he can to make them happen, he said.

“Sometimes I feel guilty” about the deep satisfaction received from the events, Turner said. “I feel like I walk out of there feeling better than all the other people because I get so much more out of it.”

Plenty of other people get to have some of the same satisfaction. At the Thanksgiving dinner, he had 220 people volunteer part of their holiday either setting up, serving, helping with the breakdown, or finding other ways to be involved.

“I probably needed just half of those people, but I didn’t want to turn them down,” he said. So, some volunteers — kids, adults and seniors, too — decorated a few hundred paper place mats with personal messages.

“We had some very pretty place mats,” Turner said. “It is not all about lugging tables around.”

He doesn’t know yet what the dinner’s menu will consist of because he has to see what in-kind donations of food come in before the dinner. He does always plan to have at least two kinds of meats, a vegetable, salad, bread, beverages and desserts.

The desserts are baked or donated by Elgin area residents, too, and can be dropped off at In the Neighborhood Deli, 185 Edison Ave., Elgin, in the days leading up to the dinner. He will accept donations for the meal there, too.