Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Centers
In 1998, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's CEO Ray Kroc, donated $90 million to the Salvation Army to build a comprehensive community center in San Diego, California. Her wish was to create a center, supported in part by the community, where children and families would be exposed to different people, activities and arts that would otherwise be beyond their reach. Completed in 2002, the center sits on 12 acres (49,000 m2) and offers an ice arena, gymnasium, three pools, rock climbing walls, a performing arts theatre, an internet-based library, computer lab, and a school of visual and performing arts.
When Joan Kroc died in October 2003, she left $1.5 billion - much of her estate - to The Salvation Army, by far the largest charitable gift ever given to the Army, and the largest single gift given to any charity at one time. The initial disbursements of this bequest began in January 2005. The gift had by then grown to $1.8 billion and was split evenly among the four Army Territories - Central, East, South and West. The money was designated to build a series of state-of-the-art Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Centers nationwide patterned after the San Diego center.
By the end of 2009, the Army operated six centers across the country in Ashland, OH; Atlanta, GA; Coeur d'Alene, ID; Omaha, NE; Salem, OR; and San Francisco, CA. Seven more centers followed in 2010 in Dayton, OH; Grand Rapids, MI; Green Bay, WI; Kerrville, TX; Philadelphia, PA; and Quincy, IL. In 2011 centers opened in Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Greenville, SC; Memphis, TN; Phoenix, AZ; and Honolulu, HI. A date of January 28, 2012 has been set for the South Bend, IN location. Opening dates are to be determined for the final six sites in Augusta, GA; Biloxi, MS; Camden, NJ; Staten Island, NY; Puerto Rico and Norfolk, VA.
Read more about this topic: Kroc Center
Famous quotes containing the words ray, joan, corps, community and/or centers:
“Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,—to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“And that good Joan whom Englishmen
At Rouen doomed and burned her there,—
Mother of God, where are they then? . . .”
—Francois Villon (1431–1465)
“L’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde!”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The people needed to be rehoused, but I feel disgusted and depressed when I see how they have done it. It did not suit the planners to think how they might deal with the community, or the individuals that made up the community. All they could think was, “Sweep it away!” The bureaucrats put their heads together, and if anyone had told them, “A community is people,” they would not have known what they were on about.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)