Circle of Concern

Our Mission: Circle of Concern feeds the hungry and provides assistance to low-income families living in west St. Louis County and areas of Jefferson County, MO. Since 1967, Circle of Concern has served those in need with our food pantry, financial assistance, scholarships and other programs. In the pantry, we are committed to providing both canned/boxed nonperishable food AND fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, cheese and some meat. Financial assistance meets critical needs to avert an eviction or to keep the utilities on. Scholarships help young people go to college and help adult clients gets critical job training and certifications; in both cases, they are a step toward breaking the cycle of poverty. Holiday programs such as Thanksgiving Baskets, Holiday Family Adoption and Toy Day ease expenses during that joyful time of year. With these programs - and more - Circle is committed to helping our neighbors-in-need so they can direct their own resources toward rebuilding their financial foundations.

We envision improving every life in our community by reducing hunger and poverty.

Goal One: Our 1st strategic goal - Support our Volunteer Program. With an Active roster of nearly 300 volunteers, many of whom are Seniors, we are dedicated to enlisting and retaining effective talent.

Goal Two: Our 2nd strategic goal - Meet Client Need through Circle’s Program Offerings. Objectives include identifying new service area, plus new resources for mental health care, childcare, housing support.

Goal Three: Our 3rd strategic goal - Connect Clients to Wraparound Services through Strategic Partnerships Objectives focus on partnership with key area Housing agencies, schools, mental health orgs, faith grps.

Throughout the last 18 months of the pandemic, a key investment of time has been in nurturing the capacity of our executive director and our client services director to address housing issues that are central to the complex needs of many of our clients. This investment has taken the form of time spent participating as a committee chair for the St. Louis County Continuum of Care housing organization, in order to impact the issue overall for the area and to bring expertise home to add to our organization's ability to serve our clients' needs. It has also involved allowing time for online trainings and meetings to build our familiarity of and access to government programs such as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in order to assist our clients as they navigate pursuit of housing assistance. Circle has long provided emergency assistance to help our clients with past-due rent issues, but this increased capacity in our directors will directly help our clients move past housing emergency.

We all experienced the global, then national, then state, then local reports of a pandemic that promised to drastically negatively impact day-to-day life for every one of us ... and we knew our clients already live at the margins. Circle of Concern had no choice but to adapt and continue serving to, potentially, a huge influx of people in west St. Louis County. In planning for the unknown future, we focused on two things - (1) assuring the health and safety of ALL our constituents (clients, volunteers, donors, staff, vendors, general community) and (2) implementing our programs as fully as possible within those safe parameters to meet our mission of feeding the hungry and providing assistance to low-income families: (1) The rapidly-unfolding safety guidelines issued by our county health department informed our evolving plans and requirements related to masking, safe distancing, group sizes, disinfecting and other logistical decisions. By sticking to those guidelines as they've changed over time, we have maneuvered through client-number spikes, new virus variants and months that felt normal. Sticking to those guidelines also set expectations in our facility that we will always function in ways that promote safety and curtail the spread of virus. (2) That focus on safety is the foundation of changes we made to programs and operations, none of which were sidelined. Most visible of those is our shift from our client-choice model of food pantry distribution (clients "shop" for the foods their families prefer) and to a curbside distribution model in which our masked volunteers prefill bags of food to be placed safely in clients' car trunks to maintain safe distancing. It guided our decisions to give clients gifts cards in programs like Summer Kid Bags, Back-To-School supplies, Thanksgiving Baskets and Holiday Adoption, instead of holding traditionally huge gatherings to distribute food, school supplies or holiday gifts. Zoom board and committee meetings are the norm now.