A lot has changed in the last few years, Carol’s Kindness has grown to a huge operation that regularly involves more than 20 trips a week to collect 7,000 – 10,000 pounds of food. The distribution operation that started on her driveway is now a pantry operating out of the Gus Garcia recreation center and sending home multiple bags of food to between 150 and 200 families every week.
The salvage side of the operation is the very heart of the operation, but it’s the part that people don’t ask about a lot. They are interested in what we do with the food once we have it who we serve with this food that has been salvaged. We talk about the families that we serve, the outreach that we do, and all of this is dependent on the food that we can acquire to share. Carol says she has an army to do this work. No general ever kept so many balls in the air at the same time with the phone constantly ringing and with people asking questions and got it all done week after week after week.
It took 10 years to become a nonprofit organization. This enables Carol’s Kindness to receive monetary donations and grants. People ask why, if you’re only getting donated food, do you need any money? At times, the donated food runs to things that are not enough to support a family for the week. Other times, the food that we get donated needs to be packaged in containers to be distributed to the public. We frequently get a lot of fruit, lettuce, and other salads, huge amounts of sweets of all kinds, and all kinds of beverages. What does not get donated are the normal staples: oatmeal, pasta, rice, flour, sugar, beans, and canned goods of all kinds. It has been a blessing to be able to purchase these items to provide a much more balanced offering than just whatever came in in mass this week. It has enabled us to store the non-perishable items for several weeks to spread them out instead of trying to get rid of 100s of pounds of donuts on one Saturday.
If you have not seen our home page and the impact we make (in numbers), take a look: www.carolskindness.org
Pantry stats for 2025
Total registered 16,499 100% increase in persons served
Total household members served 34,411 35.5% increase
Total clients over 60 served
Total kids served including outreach 10,394 100% increase
Total Unhoused served including outreach 10,639 150% increase
Total volunteers 2876
Food donated/salvaged 368,221 pounds 35.6% increase over 2024
Lastly, if it were not for Carol Rabun pursuing donations relentlessly, we would not have much to give out. The continuous relationship building and developing new partnerships are her specialty, and she does it so well.