CROS Ministries

Community Food PantriesCROS operates eight food pantries. Seven are in community partner buildings located in food-insecure communities. The eighth is a mobile pantry unit that serves eight locations with distributions during evening and weekend hours, and which provides pantry access to people who have jobs or barriers to transportation. The pantries distribute bags of non-perishable food which last a minimum of four days. Fresh produce is distributed, when available, as well as frozen meats. In 2022, CROS pantries distributed food to 111,744 individuals (duplicated); 31% were children; 11% were seniors. In 2022, we had 8,659 individuals come to the pantries seeking food assistance for the first time.

The Caring Kitchen The Caring Kitchen is a community-centered meal program that insures hungry people are fed six days of the week. Lunch is served Monday through Friday and bag lunches are distributed on Saturday. Meals are delivered to homebound clients by volunteers who also do health/welfare check-ins. The Caring Kitchen is a food recovery program that collects safe and wholesome food donated from commercial sources to meet the nutritional needs of the hungry. In 2022, the delivery of service method, created the prior year due to the COVID, continues with providing to-go meals instead of serving congregant meals. In 2022, the Caring Kitchen served 42,410 meals.

Gleaning and Food RecoveryGleaning is the collection of crops either from farmers' fields that have already been mechanically harvested or from fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest, due to low market prices. Partnerships with local growers who allow access to fields provide fresh produce that is often lacking in the diets of people who are food insecure. CROS's Gleaning Program uses an army of approximately 3,860 volunteers to glean fresh produce that would otherwise go to waste. Partnering with local food banks, the fresh produce is distributed to meal kitchens and food pantries that feed the hungry. 779,463 pounds of produce was recovered in 2022.

CROS CampCROS' camp program provides fun camp experiences during the breaks for children living in Title 1 zip codes (neighborhoods receiving federal funding for schools where at least 40% of students are from families with low incomes). Summer campers receive lunch and a snack daily as well as backpacks filled with food to take home over the weekend. A school readiness curriculum is an important part of CROS camp to prevent the decline in academic skills that can occur over the summer break.