Happy Thanksgiving from Denver Rescue Mission!
Your continued support throughout the year is essential in helping us end homelessness in our city, one life at a time. With your support this Thanksgiving, we were able to provide:
- Thousands of meals for struggling families through our Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box program
- Hundreds of meals to neighbors in desperate need at our shelters
- A festive holiday celebration to families and individuals in our life-changing programs at The Crossing
- Turkeys for nearly 150 churches and other community organizations who host their own holiday meals and food distributions
Because supporters and volunteers like you do your part, we are empowered to serve our most vulnerable neighbors through meeting immediate needs and helping them create lasting change in their lives.
Check out more details and photos of the lives you helped change this Thanksgiving:
What Are You Thankful For?
The kids in The Crossing’s Youth Center have a lot to be thankful for, especially supporters like you whose financial support ensures the Bridge program at The Crossing helps families thrive.
This holiday season, you can buy gifts for kids in the Youth Center by sponsoring our EPIC Store with the purchase of toys and games!
2024 Turkey Drive: 16,000 Turkeys!
Our annual Turkey Drive and helps put a turkey on every table, providing a hearty Thanksgiving meal for thousands of Colorado families and individuals in need and providing critically needed meals throughout the holiday season.
Every turkey donated brings hope, dignity and an opportunity to connect for guests, program participants, and more. This year, with your generous support, we collect over 16,000 turkeys!
Turkey Fundraisers Change Lives
This year, 11 fundraisers and their supporters raised more than $5,000 for the Turkey Drive!
Thank you for starting your own turkey drive fundraiser to help us meet our goal this year and work to end homelessness together.
Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box
This year marks 30 years that we’ve been hosting our Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box event! Started in 1994, this event has been going strong, and this year we gave 3,506 turkeys and Thanksgiving meal essentials to families and individuals in need in our community!
Faces were beaming as each neighbor received their turkey and meal box, and more than 40 volunteers rallied together to unload turkeys, receive vouchers from guests, and place the gifted turkey and boxes into each vehicle.
“Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart. To be able to show this to the girls [helps us] be as grateful as we can be for the whole year, not just this week.”
Selena, Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box recipient
The support of community members like you makes it all possible these last 30 years. We are overjoyed that we can make the holidays meaningful for so many families through this simple gesture!
Banquets & Blessings
With Thanksgiving marking Colorado’s transition into winter, it is often a difficult time for people experiencing homelessness, as they struggle against the ever-colder weather. The holidays are also just a difficult time of year for so many who are lonely and disconnected from friends and family. By providing them with a warm Thanksgiving meal, we’re able to bring some light into a dark time.
Prepared by our experienced cooks, these banquets are offered to the public at our Lawrence Street Community Center and 48th Avenue Center, and to program participants at The Crossing. Consisting of all of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes—from cranberries and turkey to mashed potatoes—the banquet meals allow our guests to escape the cold and enjoy community and a festive meal.
Meals like this also help us build trust between our staff and guests, which enables us to speak into their lives and offer advice on possible solutions they can take advantage of to rebuild their lives.
Thanks to the generosity of donors like you, we provided nearly 1,000 Thanksgiving meals at our Lawrence Street Shelter and 48th Avenue Center, plus even more at The Crossing earlier in the week.
We were happy to host Governor Polis (middle) and Senator Hickenlooper (right) during our annual Thanksgiving Banquet at the Lawrence Street Community Center. We appreciated their continued commitment to helping the most vulnerable Coloradoans. They served alongside our President/CEO Dennis Van Kampen (left), who experienced his first Thanksgiving banquet at the Mission.
“The Thanksgiving meal means more than most people think. It means my smile will always prosper, I’ll always have good friends and that there are people out there that are caring for us no matter where we stand. Amen. God bless. I’m glad to know that I have the opportunity to get to meet the volunteers and the meal has brought us all together. Everybody is getting along, and they got big smiles.”
Joe, Lawrence Street Community Center guest
Dennis and his family all served our neighbors together at our 30th annual Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box event.
Thank You for Serving With Us
Thank you so much for serving alongside us through your financial support, volunteering and prayer. Partners like you make all our services all year long possible, especially during the holidays.
“This was my first Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box event and my favorite day so far at the Mission! I was grateful that my whole family (minus one of my sons) was able to volunteer alongside me. To see the impact each turkey and Thanksgiving box had on every individual and family who showed up was so inspiring!”
Dennis Van Kampen, President/CEO
Dennis and his family all served our neighbors together at our 30th annual Thanksgiving Banquet-in-a-Box event.
It’s Never Too Late to Help
Whether it’s the holidays or not, we rely heavily on the generosity and support of donors like you. Please give today to help us end homelessness for more neighbors in need, one life at a time.
