A Message from Our Director

One of our core values at the Rescue Mission is community partnership. We are committed to working with our community partners in helping to serve our neighbors, prevent homelessness and help those who are trying to climb their way out of addiction and poverty.

When we have an excess of a certain item – be it perishable food or something else – we work to funnel our excess to one of our community partners. We constantly send our overflow of donated perishable food to other ministries that help the poor and when we had hundreds of pairs of teenage-size jeans donated to us, we joined up with Glendale Middle School to get those jeans into the hands of needy students coming back to school.

When we help kids with free jeans and help other ministries provide food to the needy, we are really helping to prevent homelessness in the future. The more food and clothing we can get out to our community through our partnering agencies, the less chance there is that an out-of-work family will end up homeless. With food and clothing needs met, a family in need can focus what little resources they might have on paying their rent and staying off the streets.

While we are constantly blessing other organizations with our excess, we are in turn blessed by other homeless service providers who do things for our clients that we can’t. For instance, the 4th Street Clinic provides free medical care and Valley Mental Health offers free psychiatric services to people staying at the Rescue Mission.

It’s great to serve the poor among us in this type of symbiotic community – one where we bless others who desperately need the services we provide and where others bless us by providing our clients with more specialized services. In this respect we are able to provide holistic services to an even greater extent.

We are also dependent on you, our supporters. I want to share with you that for every month in 2010 the Rescue Mission has operated at a loss. In short our bills are outpacing donations we receive. Our losses come despite our every effort to reduce spending. Our current actual expenditures are far below what we budgeted for at the beginning of the year. So we are being very frugal during our present hardship. The good news is that during more robust times we were able to build an emergency buffer for tough times like these. However, those savings are now significantly depleted and we can’t keep operating at a loss.

I want to ask all of you that truly believe in the work we are doing to consider donating today. We are heading into our busiest season of the year and we truly believe God wants us to continue our mission of restoring broken lives in the name of Jesus Christ.

God bless you,

Chris D. Croswhite

Rescue Mission of Salt Lake