Quaboag chamber names Sorel Citizen of the Year

By Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

Maggie Sorel (Stan Sherer photo)

he Quaboag Chamber of Commerce celebrated the community achievements of Maggie Sorel, clerk IV at Commonwealth College, at a May 3 gathering where she was named the region's first-ever Citizen of the Year.

     "It's overwhelming," Sorel said of the award. "This is once in a lifetime. I didn't even know there was such a thing."

     "They were talking about things I didn't even remember," she said of the award ceremony. "You don't do things and write them down."

     Sorel, who opened a coffee shop in Ware last May, is not a member of the chamber - though she says she'd been thinking about joining - but she is well-known to the Ware community where she has been a Girl Scout leader, a Junior Achievement instructor, and a justice of the peace, and is one of the initial two women to integrate the Ware Lions Club along gender lines. As a member of the Lions, she collected 2002 pairs of eyeglasses last year for its campaign to donate glasses for people in the Third World. She volunteers at the United Church of Ware, visits visually impaired people, delivers meals to the homebound and has raised money for cancer research.

     Her coffee shop, called "brewed awakening," is an exercise in civic pride, too. Each of its 12 tabletops was painted by a different local artist. Sorel uses the shop's walls to exhibit a local artist's work each month and is booked with displays through 2005. She also collects canned goods at her establishment for a local food pantry, hosts open mic nights on Thursdays and provides live acoustic guitar music on Fridays and Saturdays.

     In addition, early this year Sorel helped another local woman to start a business, called "what's cookin'," by partnering with her to share the space where she runs brewed awakening. Denise Wilga, a lifelong friend, now owns a breakfast and lunch restaurant that runs weekdays in the same space, using the hours in the business day when brewed awakening would otherwise be closed.

     She also is raising her 17-year-old daughter.

     "For 25 years I talked about it," she said of opening the shop. "When my mother died, it was really the turning point." Sorel said her mother's passing helped her to realize there was no reason to wait to pursue her dreams and she notes that 20 years ago the Ware Rotary Club bestowed on her mother a citizen of the year award, the precursor to Sorel's honor.

     Although the coffee shop itself has provided the means for much of her recent civic activity, Sorel hasn't relied on it alone. As a justice of the peace, she donated "rush weddings" for servicemen and -women who were being deployed to Iraq earlier this year.

    She isn't resting on her Lions Club laurels, either. For the club's eyeglasses campaign this year she's trying to collect 2003 pairs.