Contributing a casserole to the potluck is basic Midwest manners. Casseroles are simple to heat, freeze, share and fill up on, not to mention a great vehicle for both healthy and tasty ingredients. Finding a neighbor at the door holding their famous tater-tot casserole can provide much-needed comfort during a time of grief or struggle.
“Just from a practical perspective, they’re pretty easy to make,” said Leslie Shalabi, co-founder of Convivium Urban Farmstead in Dubuque. “We make and bake and give away 250 free casseroles every week, every week of the year.”
Convivium is a restaurant, coffee house, catering company, event space, urban farm and educational nonprofit. It’s also a well-oiled casserole-making machine. Since they started their free casserole program in September 2020, Shalabi’s team has given away some 35,000 to locals in need.
“We don’t define what ‘in need’ means,” she explained. “So if you feel that you need a casserole, you can have a casserole. We know through collecting demographic information that most of the people getting these casseroles are very low income: 70 percent report a household income of less than $25,000 a year.”
There’s no registration necessary to claim a casserole — just show up at a pick-up location (Convivium from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m., or Resources Unite from 2-4 p.m.) any Thursday and grab a pan while supplies last. Free casseroles are delivered around Dubuque each week as well, though Convivium has had to close their list until they have the resources to make more deliveries, or until demand settles down.
Unfortunately, the latter is not likely anytime soon: Food pantries in Iowa have faced unprecedented strain as pandemic-era aid programs dry up, state lawmakers roll back food assistance and inflation and corporate price-gouging drive up costs.
When Shalabi and her husband Mike Muench opened Convivium (the name means “feast” in Latin) in 2017, they knew they were bringing something positive to the North Jackson Street neighborhood, which sits in a low-income, limited-food-access area of Dubuque. “If we were going to make a big investment, why not make it in the area that we can really make a big difference?” Shalabi said of their location choice. But they had no idea how fruitful their small farm could truly be, nor how much it would be needed.
“The thing about growing food — actual stuff you can eat right off the vine, which is not what corn and soybeans are — is it doesn’t take very much space at all,” Shalabi said. “I mean, we have 13,000 square feet of growing space, and we grow between four- to five-thousand pounds of vegetables each year. So I think people are really amazed at what we can accomplish in a small space.”
Before Convivium, the land it’s located on was home to an old greenhouse complex that was in disrepair after being unused for more than decade. Shalabi and Muench bought the property in 2013 and began construction on their farmstead in 2015. One greenhouse stayed a greenhouse, while the other was renovated into a restaurant, coffee shop, commercial kitchen, training kitchen and learning center. The restaurant and catering service operate symbiotically with Convivium’s gardens and its outreach efforts, which include low-cost cooking and gardening classes, a kid’s camp, interactive tours and, of course, the casserole program.
“In addition to being a restaurant, we are a nonprofit, which I think is kind of unusual, so all of the profits from the restaurant go back to help people in the community,” Shalabi explained.
“Every time you eat with us, you’re helping to feed families in need in the community.”
There are three types of garden at Convivium. First are the demonstration gardens, used for classes and finicky plant projects like herb spirals, potato towers and straw bale gardens. Next are the production gardens, which supply the restaurant.
“In the production gardens, we grow a lot of things that can be preserved and used later, in addition to the stuff that we’re using right away,” Shalabi said. “So we do garlic, a lot of garlic; various types of tomatoes that we process into Bloody Mary mix, tomato jam and pizza sauce; and then lots of basil. We make a lot and sell a lot of pesto.”
Last are the common beds, raised yellow garden beds growing some 80 or 90 different varieties of food, all available for public picking: big, juicy tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, green beans, cucumbers, peppers, kale, collard greens and more. Folks can make requests for certain fruits, vegetables and herbs to be added.
Common beds weren’t originally part of the plan, but then 2020 arrived and service screeched to a halt.
“We got to harvest season, August, September, and the restaurant wasn’t open. And so we have all this produce and no outlet for it,” Shalabi said. “This was also a time when food insecurity was becoming much, much more prevalent, especially in our neighborhood.”
They shared their bounty with the hungry public, and cooked what they could into casseroles to give away — a practice they’ve continued. What’s more, Convivium’s neighbors were willing to donate their backyards for use as additional garden space.
“We never saw ourselves as providing direct services,” Shalabi said. “We wanted to be more of an educational-based nonprofit and teach people about food. But this was just a situation where people needed food.”
Along with their full-time farm manager AJ Shultz, Convivium has employees to lead programs, run their restaurant and cater events. But their mission relies on volunteers — Shalabi said about 300 individuals donated 5,000 hours of their time to Convivium in 2023, either preparing casseroles, maintaining the gardens or processing harvests.
Folks can contribute to the feast in other ways. In early spring, for example, Convivium puts out a call for maple sap — either bring some in, or invite them over to tap your tree.
“We collect it, put that all together, boil it down, make it into syrup and then have this pancake breakfast that’s pay-what-you-want,” Shalabi said.
The co-founder said it’s not uncommon to spot visitors wiping away tears while touring the farmstead. She thinks she understands why.
“Things are so fractured and I think you can really sense animosity, maybe, just bubbling under the surface in a lot of different areas of our life. And so, to come across a situation where people are just simply being generous for the sake of being generous, I think, is very heartwarming, and people are really drawn to it.”
Whatever the reason, Convivium admirers were quick to act when the organization asked for support last December. Their heating system needed repair, but business had been slow lately and funds were tight.
“I made a personal appeal on our Facebook page,” Shalabi recalled. “I just said, ‘Hey, our heat went out. It’s going to cost $5,500 to fix. Please, you know, please come back.’ And not only did we have some of the biggest days that we’ve had, people donated $30,000 in three days — in three days. It was really quite something.”
Despite the chaos of managing a restaurant, farmstead and nonprofit simultaneously, Convivium’s first seven years have provided plenty of validation for Shalabi and Muench, who left lucrative careers in Madison, Wisconsin to pursue this project. Shalabi was a partner in a public relations agency, but hit a wall: “I was just very empty inside,” she said. Her husband, who owned an insurance agency, was experiencing something similar.
“So we decided, OK, well, we’re gonna get together and do something to stop this feeling,” she said. “We started really asking ourselves ‘what did we want our legacy to be?’ That led to, ‘what problem do we want to solve?’”
They settled on food, hoping to facilitate connections among people — one reason their restaurant has communal dining tables. In the decade since they made Dubuque home, every seed planted, fruit harvested, pesto panini served, Bloody Mary stirred, wedding catered and casserole delivered have reinforced this bold, admittedly uninformed decision.
“I have no background in food or gardening, and that’s why I thought I could do this,” Shalabi said with a laugh. “Sometimes your ignorance is what lets you take a chance on things.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s 2024 Bread & Butter special issue.
