A group of volunteers from Marine Corps Base Hawai'i at Kane'ohe Bay is providing and serving a meal once a month to people staying at the Institute for Human Services homeless shelter in Iwilei.

As the dozen volunteers serve helpings of stir-fry beef, veggies, fruit and cake, they receive as much from the experience as they give, said organizer Jessica Carrigan-Broda, wife of Coast Guard helicopter pilot Cmdr. Peter Broda, stationed at Kane'ohe Bay.

"We have active-duty military, single people, teenagers and retired people," Carrigan-Broda said. "They go away with more compassion. They are surprised when they see how many different people come in to the shelter."

Each month, Carrigan-Broda and her stable of volunteers feed about 300 people at IHS. Kate Bepko, IHS manager for public relations and volunteers, said she is grateful for help from groups such as Carrigan-Broda's.

"Our kitchen is hurting," Bepko said. "We are short on funding — and food."

Carrigan-Broda plans the menu and shops for the groceries. The Marine Corps Base Hawai'i chapel donates $500 a month for the program, and will continue the meals when the Brodas move to New Jersey at the end of the month.

Gabby Hanley, 13, an eighth-grader at St. Anthony's School in Kailua, became involved when she saw a notice in a church bulletin a year ago. She said her perception of homeless people has changed.

"You wouldn't know they were homeless," she said. "They were dressed nicely."

Hanley said when a classmate came to help, he was nervous at first but by the end thought it was really cool.

"It makes me think of how lucky I am," she said. "I see these people — they don't have so much."

Carrigan-Broda, 42, a native of Holyoke, Mass., has always been drawn to public service and working with the disadvantaged. As a high school student she cared for her mother, who used a wheelchair, and advocated for her at a time when people with disabilities had little or no access to public services.

When she was in law school, she said, she tracked down her father, who had abandoned their family of eight children, and sued him for back child support.

She won.

The Kailua resident and mother of three also volunteers at the women's prison in Kailua. She said her Catholic faith and serving the poor "keeps me humble and gives me a sense of perspective.

"The kitchen is small and hot. But to get volunteers to come back again — you know they have to be getting something out of it."

The Rev. Stephen Linehan, the Navy chaplain at the Kane'ohe base chapel, echoed that sentiment. "It's not so much what we do for the poor; it's what they do for us."