The Community Outreach Center started as a dream shared by several members of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, who worked in the Soup Kitchen in the basement of that same building. We wanted to move the Soup Kitchen to a bigger, more accessible location that just happened to be next door. At about the same time in 2002, the two Episcopal churches were making plans to merge, so it was a perfect time to sell the St. Mark’s building, buy the neighboring MPCU building and give the Soup Kitchen a new home.
In 2003 that is exactly what happened. And since there was so much extra room, we invited four other charities to share the space at no charge. With this development, a new Board of Directors was formed to run the newly named Community Outreach Center. A facility dedicated to housing social service charities free of charge, so that they could use their meeger funds on their very important missions.