PRESQUE ISLE – Volunteers at the Martha & Mary’s Soup Kitchen are accustomed to working on a shoestring so they can have more to give to those who have less.

When a group of students from the University of Maine at Presque Isle offered to donate their time and expertise to renovate the building’s interior, they were welcomed with open arms.

Twenty members of the Student Organization of Social Workers spent Saturday and Sunday at the soup kitchen, sawing, pounding, painting and cleaning.

When the dust had settled and the paint had dried, the serving area was insulated, covered with new sheetrock and painted. Two drafty windows were gone, new shelves had been installed, and the work area was completely renovated.

“This is totally awesome,” Cindy Patten, a member of the soup kitchen’s board of directors, said Saturday as she surveyed the work in progress. “To think that someone could come in and take the time to do this is amazing.”

It’s all in a day’s – make that semester’s – work for students in UMPI’s social work degree program, Kim-Anne Perkins, faculty adviser, said Saturday.

“Our social work students are required to perform 40 hours of volunteer service and an additional 500 hours of fieldwork with local agencies,” Perkins said. “This community project is above and beyond the requirement of volunteer and fieldwork hours.”

For their part, the students were more than happy to give up part of their weekend to help out.

“It’s nice to do a project for other people,” Kent DeMerchant, UMPI student, said. “When we are done here, we have helped people who will feed other people.”

An experienced carpenter, DeMerchant was in charge of the weekend’s operations and seemed to be everywhere at once, removing windows, sawing boards or painting a set of shelves he had built in his garage for installation in the facility’s work area.

While happy that the students’ efforts will have an impact, DeMerchant also was saddened by the need.

“It’s a real shame that there are hungry people in the county,” he said.

Keeping the project local was important to the students, who in past years have volunteered time at the Ronald McDonald House in Bangor.

“We were looking for a local project,” Donna Tilley, fourth-year student and vice president of the social workers organization, said. “We wanted to keep it in northern Maine.”

This kind of work, Perkins said, is every bit as important as what goes on in the classroom.

“This helps the students get an idea of what social work is, outside of the classroom,” she said. “They recognize a need other people don’t see.”

It is a need Patten knows too well. Open five days a week, the soup kitchen serves 50 to 70 meals a day during the winter months and about half that during the summer, she said.

They also operate a food pantry and free clothing outlet for those in need.

Along with the volunteer labor, all materials used in the renovation process were donated by local businesses, right down to the coffee and doughnuts for the breaks.

Student Bruce Archer was in charge of securing the donated items, in lieu of working with tools or paintbrushes.

“I’m legally blind,” he said with a big grin. “I do anything that doesn’t involve saws, knives or hammers.”

So Archer turned his talents to amassing the wood, paint and other materials needed for the project. It was an easy sell, he said.

“The first business I called was S.W. Collins in Caribou and they told me to fax a list of what we needed,” Archer said. “They called back and said they would give us everything we asked for; about $500 worth of stuff.”

When he discovered he had miscalculated by a bit, MPG Shopping Center in Presque Isle donated the remaining needed materials.

“If you need something for nothing for a good project, Bruce [Archer] will hook you up,” DeMerchant said.

In all, with donated materials and time, DeMerchant estimated the value of the weekend’s work at $3,000.

The scope of the students’ projects often amazes Perkins, but she said they always come through.

“These students take full loads of courses, many have jobs and families,” she said. “They still find the time to do projects like this. It’s amazing and says a lot about them.”

The students’ work, Patten said, will long be remembered and appreciated.

“Every day I come in I will be smiling and think of them and say ‘thank you,'” she said.