Mac Edwards takes leadership of Caritas Village
Mac Edwards has been named the executive director of Caritas Village, which has been closed for about a year but should reopen by mid-June.
“I’m very excited. I’ve done a lot in the restaurant business here and now to be able to do something in the nonprofit sector and give back to the town that I’ve lived in for over 40 years is great,” Edwards said.
It’s a new beginning after a tough year for both.
Caritas Village, a community center that includes a restaurant, opened in 2006 by Onie Johns, who remained executive director until December 2016. The plan was to close the building for a short time after Johns left to renovate the former Masonic lodge, but when the air conditioning went out in June, it closed abruptly and one repair led to another.
In January, Edwards closed Brooks Pharm2Fork, a popular restaurant on the Collierville square that had been open about a year.
“The bottom line is that I was having trouble making ends meet. It came to a tipping point,” Edwards said. “It wasn’t pretty, but it was time to close.”
Since then he’s been helping with an Italian restaurant in Southaven that should open in June.
Meanwhile, Caritas Village in the Binghamton neighborhood was looking for a new executive director to replace the person who came in after Johns. Edwards applied for the job.
“Basically he was the best qualified person,” Johns said. “We have community gardens in the neighborhood, and a lot of people were interested in farm to table, and he knows about that.
“He made it clear that he wants to finish out his career in the nonprofit sector, giving back, and it’s the kitchen, we feel, that will make the village sustainable.”
It’s Edwards’ plan to get food for the restaurant from the community gardens and to establish relationships with other urban gardens, too. While he won’t run the daily operations of the restaurant, as executive director he plans to establish a menu similar to the one at The Farmer, Edwards’ restaurant that closed in 2017 after six years.
“I’m going to do the kind of food that I know, so don’t be surprised to see a sloppy joe on there. I’ll use as much fresh produce as possible, maybe local protein if I can,” Edwards said.
“Part of the renovation grant includes bigger kitchen space and some new equipment. We’ll have people from the community working there plus I’m looking for a chef. And we hope to train people in the kitchen who can then go out and find work in a restaurant.”
In addition to the first-floor restaurant and coffee shop that offers dining tables and soft seating areas for folks to visit in, art classes, yoga and community events are held in the building. A second-floor amphitheater is ready to go, as is a community room that Johns says can be used for a variety of things including special dinners.
“I intend to get local musicians to play, to give new talent a place to come, get local chef friends to host dinners maybe once a month, do art shows — who knows?” Edwards said. “Some of it will be solely to benefit the community, but some of it will be to raise money.”
It’s not how Johns, who left her Germantown home and moved to the Binghamton neighborhood when she started Caritas, did things. But she says that it might be time to shake it up a little.
“As long as he sticks to the core mission, which is ‘to break down walls of hostility between cultures, to build bridges of love and trust between the rich and those made poor and to provide a positive alternative to the street corners for the neighborhood children,’ then doing things a new way should be good.”
She remains in the neighborhood and is the doyenne of Caritas.
“I’m happy to do as much as they want me to or as little as they want me to,” she said. “I will always be involved if they want me, but I also don’t want to interfere.”