All Saints Episcopal Church
In addition to being an inclusive place of worship for our community, All Saints’ is also the home of Ravenswood Community Services, a non-profit organization founded by the congregation in 2001 to provide hunger and poverty relief, health services, and life skills education in the Ravenswood and Uptown neighborhoods.
Every Tuesday night, more than 325 neighbors come to our Food Pantry where they can pick up several bags of groceries, filled with staples. We also offer a “no-kitchen” option with easy-to-fix items for our neighbors who live on the streets.
Approximately 125 of those neighbors stay for dinner at our Community Kitchen. It is not a traditional, impersonal soup kitchen but a family-style meal served to our neighbors by dedicated teams of volunteers who have also prepared the meal and often join our neighbors for dinner and conversation. The majority of our patrons reside within a 12-block area, but some even travel from as far as the South Side for our food and fellowship.
Services for Hungry Families and Homeless Neighbors
Participating neighbors also have access to on-site health screenings and education led by retired nurses from the parish who coordinate a partnership with the School of Nursing at DePaul University. It is basic health care—and as often as not, is more about listening to people who have no one willing to hear their stories as it is about diabetes and blood pressure management or help with medications.
Through partnerships with outside agencies, RCS also hosts other programs and services such as food stamp prequalification, job recruitment or affordable housing counseling. Our volunteers are also in the planning stages for new adult literacy and nutrition education programs to be launched later this year.
At-risk Youth Mentoring/Support
RCS has a strong partnership with Ravenswood Elementary School, the neighborhood public school where more than two-thirds of the students come from low-income households. In connection with the school we provide food, life-skills education and youth mentoring to students and their families. That includes a monthly Saturday Market Pantry for more than 140 families (from the school and the broader community).
We also produce the “Reality Fair,” a three-dimensional manifestation of the popular board game Life. This virtual game teaches 7th and 8th graders practical life skills as they make the kind of choices and face the kind of financial realities that mimic real life challenges. It is part of a financial literacy curriculum that helps young people consider their future. Our expanding “focus:future,” program reinforces that, helping guide students through the stressful and competitive high school assessment process.
More than 100 volunteers serve in these All Saints’/RCS programs in any given month. Our work is just as important to them as it is to the hundreds of at-risk families we serve. From the base of All Saints we, together, build community. This place—this vibrant, aging, living space—truly matters.
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