Weekly food truck event raising money for Restore Freeport Community Park

Freeport Community Park will welcome food trucks throughout the summer for weekly events raising money for the park’s upkeep.

Jackie Gaughan, who operates a semi-permanent food truck in Freeport, is organizing the weekly event, which she calls Freeport’s Food Truckin’ Thursdays.

Every Thursday — beginning June 3 and continuing through Sept. 2 — her food truck will join other vendors at Laube Hall at the park from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Just a Girl with a Mobile Deli, the food truck Gaughan operates typically at Freeport Food Lot on Freeport Road, will be there every week. Other vendors will vary throughout the summer.

For their first event, vendors will include Popped Envy, Kona Ice, Main Squeeze Juice and Fat N Nat, a local food truck specializing in barbecue.

“It’s kind of cool in the food truck business,” Gaughan said. “It’s a brotherhood or sisterhood where we all work together. It’s not a competition or a rivalry. Everybody’s friendly, everybody wants everybody to do well.”

Vendors will pay a fee — $25 for the first week, $50 for every week after — to participate. Those funds will benefit Restore Freeport Community Park, a grassroots nonprofit that works to restore and revitalize Freeport Community Park.

“They got hit really hard the last two years with covid,” Gaughan said. Their largest fundraiser event, a Valentine’s dance, was scrapped two years in a row because of the pandemic. “They were at a standstill with their funds.”

So far, Gaughan has raised $550 to benefit Restore Freeport Community Park.

She expects to see several hundred people at their first weekly event.

The food trucks will be set up by the tennis courts.

Gaughan recommended people bring their own chairs.

Gaughan said she’s appreciative of the community, who has rallied behind her new business and her efforts to help a local nonprofit hit hard by the pandemic.

“The town has been so receptive and so supportive of not just my business, but all the businesses that have been here,” she said. “We can’t do this without them.”