Yelm resident inspired to serve the community through fresh, home-cooked meals

Erin Sunshine, a longtime Yelm resident and former business owner in the community, believes nobody deserves to go hungry.

Her actions have backed her beliefs throughout 2025, as earlier in the year she began promoting and offering free, fresh, home-cooked meals to community members from “all walks of life.”

For three days throughout each week, Sunshine will meet members of the community at various locations in Yelm to hand out meals she’s made herself. She began offering these meals to anyone in need of dinner in a local Facebook group called “Reaching Out: Yelm and Surrounding Areas” earlier in the year, and she has given out hot meals such as soup, fried rice, noodles, chicken teriyaki, chicken legs and more.

“I hand out meals on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I work Friday through Monday, 10 hours a day. That’s why I need to take three days off. Two days of my time off, I’m cooking,” Sunshine said in an interview with the Nisqually Valley News on Tuesday, July 1. “On the third day, on Thursdays, I go replenish inventory and go shopping, restock supplies.”
Each day she offers community meals, she’ll first set up in Yelm’s Walmart parking lot around 7:30 or 8 p.m. After handing out her first round of food, Sunshine heads to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to feed attendees.

“A lot of them struggle with alcoholism, and they chose to heal. They chose themselves. I decided that I want to take care of those people as well,” she said. “Some of them don’t have a home, and so for me to be able to do that for those people is helpful to another community.”

Sunshine concludes her routine by stopping at the Burger King parking lot to feed an elderly homeless community, followed by a trip to the Nisqually Pines. Once she arrives in the Nisqually Pines community, she gives hot meals to front office workers to distribute to members of the neighborhood fighting Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Sunshine also admitted that she’s no stranger to struggling. Now that she’s in a position to give back to other community members facing hard times, she believes she has found her calling and her “why” as a person.

“This community has been amazing to me. When I had my nail business, when I first moved here in 2010, it helped me get established. I was welcomed and loved immediately. I became a single mother in 2014, and there was a community to support me and follow me everywhere I went,” Sunshine said. “I always wanted to give back. We were homeless when I first became a single mom, and then the community helped me tremendously to get back on my feet.”

Sunshine thought she’d have to wait until she came across some money to begin giving back to the local community, but after seeing so many posts on Facebook about families searching for food, she began to come up with a plan.

“I have to raise my kids by myself, so I try to be very careful financially. My son went to the food bank, and it gave us a lot of food. There was no way I could’ve cooked and eaten all that food, so I asked myself what to do with it. Of course, the answer was within the question — I’m going to cook for people,” Sunshine said. “I felt a calling to do something for people, and it’s my pleasure. I’m honored to be part of the community and give back. It’s my time, my turn to give back.”

Eventually, Sunshine began using money out of her own pocket to purchase additional food, storage supplies and more cooking equipment to further give back to the community.

“It’s inspired me to cook bigger portions as more and more people showed up. There’s so much pain in people, and I just want to help,” Sunshine said. “I struggle, but we all struggle together. Nobody should struggle alone in this economy, in this time — it’s difficult. I’m just blessed that I still have a job and an amazing boss who understands my situation.”

Sunshine said she went from working seven days a week to four days in order to supplement her goal of serving the community.

Through her volunteer work, Sunshine has come across and recognized several vulnerable communities in Yelm, including several who are homeless and elderly and sleep in a van in a local parking lot.

She’s also served other elderly members of the community who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and dementia and cannot own or operate stoves or other items to cook food where they live. She’s thankful for the front office of the Nisqually Pines for helping distribute her meals to members of that community who deal with those illnesses.

“They often forget to eat because of their illness. They won’t remember if they ate or not, and a lot of them went hungry,” she said. “I’ve been told that, ‘for as long as I could remember, this is the first home-cooked meal I’ve had,’ because they have canned food or frozen food. Props to those ladies for personally delivering the food and having those elders sit down and eat. It encouraged me to keep going. I can’t stop.”

Additionally, Sunshine’s volunteer work within the community has opened her eyes to the vast number of community members in need of help or support.

“There are people from all different walks of life that I couldn’t imagine, but I see it now, and I can’t stop. If I have to go find ways to work another job at night, I would, to provide this option. There’s single parents, single mothers and single fathers,” she said. “I found out there’s a single father whose wife just was killed a few months ago. They had four kids, little kids, and now he’s a single parent. She was killed in a car accident, caused by a DUI, and his wife was the victim.”

Sunshine, who admitted she doesn’t typically ask for help, said she would graciously accept donations of supplies from the community to continue serving. If anyone is interested in donating to her cause of feeding the community, the best way to get in touch, she said, would be by visiting her at Walmart while she’s handing out her home-cooked meals.

“Someone who used to be a client when I still had my shop came and gave me $200. I was in tears, and she was in tears about what I’ve been doing for people. The next day, I went shopping for supplies and spent over $600 that day. Her $200 helped me out tremendously,” Sunshine said. “I don’t like to accept help. I don’t really like to ask for help, but this isn’t about me. It’s about the community and the cause I’m passionate about and believe in. That’s why I keep doing this. I can’t stop.”