Women’s Lunch Place

Women’s Lunch Place is a Boston nonprofit day shelter and advocacy center serving women who face hunger, homelessness and poverty. More than 2,400 women a year come for three scratch-made, healthy meals daily, along with hygiene and self-care services, community and creative programs. Staff provide individualized case management built around each woman’s strengths and barriers, aiming to restore stability with dignity at the center of the work.

The organization began in the early 1980s, when Eileen Reilly and Jane Alexander, both working in a mixed-gender shelter, saw that women’s needs and safety were being overlooked. On November 15, 1983, they welcomed eight women for lunch in the basement of the Church of the Covenant in the Back Bay, served on ceramic dishes at tables with fresh flowers. Today the program includes housing search and stabilization support and on-site health care.

What to Know

• On-site care covers physical and mental health, including addiction recovery, therapy and psychiatry.
• An overnight shelter-to-housing program serves 65 women.
• The annual “eat LUNCH give” fundraiser raised more than $350,000 in one recent year.
• Supporters can run the Boston Marathon as charity runners for Team WLP.