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After setting the table last Friday night, Anthoine Dube, a Knights of Columbus member and volunteer at St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men, covers a plate of bread prior to dinner at the Lewiston shelter. Volunteers have stepped up to help run the shelter in the absence of Jimi Cutting, the house manager who recently suffered a stroke. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

LEWISTON — The plans came together remarkably fast.

A local restaurant would prepare food for the shelter one night and a local fellow agreed to send pizza over on another.

Several people stepped up to cook for the shelter on the nights in between, and one man even agreed to barbecue for the group.

Staffing problem at St. Martin de Porres homeless shelter? No problem. The community has it covered.

For weeks now, a dedicated group of people have been chipping in to help at the shelter after house manager Jimi Cutting, 51, was felled by a stroke.

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That happened on June 27, when a hemorrhagic stroke knocked Cutting flat and left him partially paralyzed on his left side. He’s been at Maine Medical Center in Portland since.

Several locals from the Facebook group Lewiston Matters have been rallying around Cutting — and by extension St. Martin de Porres — since the day the stroke took him down.

“Stepping up in this small way was my way of supporting Jimi as he recovers,” said Bret Martel, a Lewiston man who barbecued for the shelter clients on Monday, “and hoping it will give him one less thing to worry about, as I know he cares deeply about the program.”

Jimi Cutting, right, stands with Russell, a client at St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men in Lewiston, in this photo taken before Cutting suffered a stroke. (Photo courtesy of Terry Capuano)

Two people in particular are being credited for organizing an effort that helps both Cutting and the people who rely on St. Martin’s Residence for Men on Bartlett Street, one of the two shelters run by St. Martin de Porres.

One of those people is Lewiston City Councilor Eryn Soule-Leclair, who even before Cutting’s illness had been cooking at St. Martin at least once a month. It was Soule-Leclair who recognized that with Cutting temporarily out of action, there were gaps in the cooking schedule at the shelter.

Then there’s Maura Murphy, co-founder of Lewiston Matters, who considers Cutting a friend. For Murphy, it was a no-brainer. Not only did she want to help Cutting, but she had become a fan of St. Martin, a shelter that has been quietly producing success stories for more than three decades in Lewiston.

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“The more I got to know Jimi, and the more I learned about St. Martin’s unique shelter model — based upon helping people help themselves — the more in awe I was,” Murphy wrote in a post on Lewiston Matters. “Jimi Cutting runs the shelter with his master’s blend of no-nonsense support and compassion mixed with pragmatic vision and unapologetic expectations and rules. Jimi is also one of the most humble people you will ever meet, and if you try to tell him how wonderful and amazing he is, he might look at you like you are speaking a foreign language.

“He asks for nothing from the Official City of Lewiston, Maine,” Murphy wrote, “but one of the important ways the Lewiston community contributes to keeping St. Martin’s running is through volunteering evening meals — whether cooked on site or purchased and dropped off.”

So, with Murphy and Soule-Leclair on board, many others jumped in to help provide food for the shelter in whatever way they could.

In addition to that, at least one person came forth with an anonymous financial donation, offering $200 to order whatever the shelter clients were craving — Popeye’s chicken, as it turned out.

A note thanking volunteers is pictured Friday at St. Martin de Porres in Lewiston. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

Where St. Martin seemed to be foundering in the aftermath of Cutting’s stroke, now it is more or less coasting, and the volunteer effort is only growing larger.

“It’s a great example of the community coming together,” said Terry Capuano, executive director of the shelter. “It’s the community helping the community while also looking out for Jimi.”

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As director, Capuano is at the shelter every day. She feeds the clients, manages the shelter finances, seeks grants and a whole bunch of other things. And for years, she has depended on Cutting, who works the late shift, where he’s responsible for managing existing and new clients.

“Jimi does the one-on-one with the guests when they come back in the evening,” Capuano said. “He works the 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. shift so he does most of the intakes with new people coming in. He’s got a really sharp eye for that because he’s been there and done that. You’re not going to pull too much over on Jimi.”

Claude Mailhot, a Knights of Columbus member and volunteer at St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men, prepares a spaghetti dinner last Friday night for residents at the Lewiston shelter. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

One of the reasons for that is that Cutting is not just a house manager at St. Martin, he’s also a former client.

In 2012, Cutting fell on hard times and ended up homeless. Eventually he made his way to St. Martin, where he turned his life around.

A few years later, he sent in an application to work at the shelter that had treated him so well.

“I believed in the mission,” Cutting said.

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That mission is pretty simple. It’s about helping the downtrodden by allowing them to help themselves.

St. Martin de Porres Residence includes the original 10-bed men’s shelter, which opened in the shadow of the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in 1991, and the St. Catherine’s Residence for Women, an eight-bed shelter added in 2018.

St. Martin de Porres was founded by Brother Irénée Richard, who was honored by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland in November of 2024.

St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men at the corner of Bartlett and College streets in Lewiston is pictured Friday. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

Richard’s philosophy held that everyone who comes into the shelter should be treated with dignity, and without judgment. Regardless of their personal situations, Richard insisted, clients should be provided a stable environment and any resources they might need to work out their problems.

Guests might stay for just a week or so or they might be there for months. According to shelter policy, each client must demonstrate a desire to make the changes necessary to improve their lives.

“It gave me a place to go at the end of the day, to take a shower, unwind, review,” one former client said when Richard was honored. “It takes me a while to process stuff, so it gave me that time to process what I went over that day with trying to find housing, trying to get better in my recovery. I mean, when you’re homeless and you’re out on the street, you don’t get the time to relax because you’ve got to be on guard at all times.”

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The shelter is replete with success stories, and for the past 10 years, Cutting has been a big part of those successes. So when the man described as “the captain of the ship” went down with a stroke, Murphy put out her appeal for volunteers and hands went up all over the place.

“It feels good to support a program like St. Martin, a shelter that has rules and the requirement that guests are accountable for taking part in their own improvement,” said Martel. “I will always do whatever I can to help someone help themselves.”

Plenty of others felt the same.

Bret Martel gives his mashed potatoes a final stir before they were served Monday night at St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men. He heard about House Manager Jimi Cutting’s health issues and volunteered to help cook meals at the Lewiston shelter. “I followed the recipe, but put extra butter in them.” he said to a client as they lined up for dinner. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

Melinda Small, owner of Legends Sports Bar and Grill, agreed to cook food for the shelter denizens and another person stepped up to deliver that food.

The operators of Kaydenz Kitchen Food Pantry jumped in with pizza and delivered several of them to St. Martin, along with some brownies for desert.

“This is how we help people back to a self-sustainable lifestyle, by giving them an opportunity,” wrote Kevin and Kristi Boilard, who run Kaydenz Kitchen with their family. “Jimi does amazing work in our community.”

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Lisa Jones, co-founder of Lewiston Matters, promptly agreed to cook for the group on a weekend night. A cooking team from the Knights of Columbus — who had already been cooking for the shelter for years — volunteered to take extra shifts.

On Friday night, Claude Mailhot was at St. Martin cooking spaghetti and preparing a salad with this wife, Denise.

“It was a shock to us when Jimi went down,” Claude said. “He’s the heart and soul of this place.”

It was one response after another, with Cutting himself weighing in from his hospital bed to make sure the food providers checked on allergies among the St. Martin population.

Murphy talked with Capuano as more and more arrangements were made. Soule-Leclair offered to take over as cook on nights when there were still gaps. She was glad to do it, she said, for the good of those at the shelter and for Cutting himself, who was stressing a bit from his hospital bed.

Lisa Jones sets out shepherd’s pie last Saturday night in the kitchen at St. Martin de Porres Residence for Men after preparing it at her home. (Russ Dillingham/Staff Photographer)

“Jimi Cutting gives his all and I am so happy to see others wanting to chip in,” Soule-Leclair wrote on Lewiston Matters. “I’m humbled by Jimi every time I visit the shelter. He is amazing and we can’t wait to have him back with us, here in Lewiston.”

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Meanwhile, a man named Chris, a former shelter client trained by Cutting to manage things at night, was overseeing things in the night shift while eagerly awaiting the boss’ return.

“We all miss Jimi,” Chris said. “We all love him and can’t wait for him to get back.”

By the weekend of July 26, Cutting was still at Maine Medical Center in Portland, but he was expecting to be moved to a rehabilitation facility “and hopefully back on my feet pretty soon,” he said.

In the end, the most magnificent thing wasn’t that so many people stepped up to help when Jimi Cutting went down. What was even more impressive was how easily it happened, how naturally people turned out to help once Murphy put out the call.

“It really is a group effort,” she said. “I love when things like this work out.”

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal reporter and weekly columnist. He's been on the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn't like getting out of bed before noon. Mark is the...

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