It’s a festive occasion—a group of women lunching together at Upstairs On The Square, 91 Winthrop Street, on a sunny day in February. Co-proprietor Mary-Catherine Deibel (photo below) greets them as old friends.

“Don’t tell me you’re all having cheeseburgers!” says Deibel as they look over the menu. One goes for the salmon; others order homemade soups or house pizza. About half the group sticks with the sirloin cheeseburgers they’ve been looking forward to ever since the last time they were here.

Nothing obvious sets these women apart from other customers in the rosy wood-panelled Monday Club room with its long curving bar, chandeliers and gilt chairs. However, their presence here is a small miracle.

They’re from On The Rise, a weekday program for women who are homeless or living in crisis in Cambridge, Somerville and Greater Boston. Located at 341 Broadway, OTR helps them as they struggle against heavy odds to become self-sufficient, healthy, and stable. Last year On The Rise assisted 358 women, up from 328 in 2008.

About a year and a half ago, OTR Development Associate Marisa Curran sent local restauranteurs a letter asking them to donate food for the breakfasts and lunches offered at the program on weekdays.

“I didn’t answer right away--I could see we’d have problems with transporting meals and things like that,” Mary-Catherine Deibel says. “But then I realized we could give the women lunch here.”

Deibel welcomes up to ten guests from OTR every month. Today some of them agree to pose for a photo. With them are Community Advocates Tina Williams (top photo, second from left)) and Wanda Rosario (center)).

Conversation at the table includes familiar topics like TV, giving up chocolate for Lent, and computer tips. But it also includes discussion of problems that don’t exist for most of us, like: what do you do when you finally get off the street and into a place of your own, and then desperate friends from your previous life come to “visit” intending to stay forever?

The women in the luncheon group are from OTR’s Keep the Keys program, which helps formerly homeless women to deal with issues that arise once they get housed. The answer to the above question is tough: help if you can, but at some point you may have to send those people and all their stuff back to the shelter (and pay their cab fare yourself).

Comments on the food and the atmosphere at the restaurant are enthusiastic: “The butternut squash soup is super.” “It’s so comfortable here.” “Wish I could decorate my place this way.” “This hamburger is exquisite—but nobody could eat a whole one and walk away.” A few take half a portion home for later; everybody chips in something for a tip.

One woman appreciates the whole event from a special, hard-won perspective: “This is a good day to be sober.”

In addition to regular meals and special celebrations such as wedding receptions, Upstairs on the Square hosts everything from teas and book groups to vegan dinners and wine tastings. The establishment is a reincarnation of Upstairs at the Pudding, which started out 28 years ago in Harvard’s Hasty Pudding building. It reopened at the current location in 2002.

Deibel is a member and supporter of numerous local professional and civic organizations including the Harvard Square Business Association, the Cambridge Office for Tourism, and the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau. She and co-owner Deborah Hughes have been honored by the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce for Excellence in Business. In addition to this luncheon project, they contribute meals for invalids and disabled people through the Community Servings program. Recently they hosted a day-long fund-raiser for Haitian relief.

Deibel is an Arlington resident. She traces her sense of community to her parents and to the ideals that surrounded her at Immaculate Heart Academy and then at Newton College of the Sacred Heart, where she got a BA in English in 1972. (She also did a Master's Degree in English at BU: "I always thought I'd be an English teacher," she says.) Noting that there’s a practical side to her activism as well as an idealistic one; she quotes something her father used to say: “Generosity is always repaid...and very concretely.”

“We support the community, and they support us in turn,” she says. “That’s why we’re still in business here after all these years.” And she welcomes a chance to help women who are trying to get their lives together.

“Any one of us can fall on hard times,” she says.