For Jill Turnbull its about personal connections. 

She spent four years working at the Dove House Recovery Café at 939 Kearney St. in Port Townsend, but even before that Turnbull was no stranger to volunteering.

Turnbull, who won second place in the best volunteer category of this year’s Readers’ Choice awards for her work at the Recovery Café, worked three years at the Boiler Room on Water Street before it closed. 

“Before the pandemic, I was volunteering at five different places,” said Turnbull, who started volunteering in high school, and retired from nursing 15 years ago. “Now, I’m only working at one, but every day it’s open during the week, Tuesdays through Fridays.”

Turnbull was interested in volunteering at the Recovery Café as soon as she heard that Dove House planned to start it, and to hear her tell it, every day has been different for her.

“Some days have a wild energy,” said Turnbull, who does two of her days there signing folks into the café. “A lot of people want to talk, so I spend a lot of time listening.”

Turnbull devotes other days to presenting the café’s patrons with their meal options for those days, and even running those orders to the kitchen, because while each day has a set menu, those menus include accommodations for dietary restrictions, such as vegetarian and vegan.

“It’s like waitressing,” Turnbull said. “I like the exercise.”

Turnbull has also helped facilitate groups at the café, which address people’s needs for both social interaction and community resources.

“There’s a real loneliness out there,” Turnbull said. “I’ve been able to see friendships form, as people have found camaraderie and come to care about each other, and it’s beautiful, like a family. Other people come in after they’ve just become homeless, and they want to take care of things like laundry and showers. And plenty of folks just want to eat.”

Turnbull noted that the Recovery Café hosts classes and other events and programs ranging from yoga and open mic nights to suicide prevention, and she’d love to see even more added, including movie and dance nights, although she acknowledged the logistics of fitting it all in.

“We all do the best we can to make everyone here feel welcome and cared about,” Turnbull said. “Some of these people are dealing with a breadth of problems that surpasses anything I knew from my own upbringing. When I finally get to know them, my heart opens up to them.”

Ash Moore, who’s worked as a recovery advocate at the Recovery Café for the past two years, commended Turnbull’s dedication to the café, as well as her institutional knowledge about it.

“Things can get hectic around here, but Jill handles it well,” Moore said. “She’s always kind.”

Turnbull herself cited a quote from the book “Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets,” by Craig Rennebohm, which stated, “No one of us is above, in front of, more worthy or better than another.”