Community Kitchen of North Iowa

03/16/2026

We will be open tonight (Monday) from 4:45 until 5:45 pm for anyone who needs a meal. We are short-staffed due to the weather, so service may be slower, but we will be open!

03/16/2026

There will be No lunch meal served today (Monday, March 16), due to the weather and road conditions. Please check back later for updates about our evening meal service.

12/31/2025

We will be closed New Year's Day, Thursday, January 1st. We are open today, Wednesday, for both meal services, lunch and evening. As a reminder, we offer dine-in and carryout for all meal services. Extra carryouts will be available for anyone who needs them!

12/29/2025

We will be open for dinner tonight from 4:45 until 5:45 pm for anyone who needs a meal. Please use caution and travel only if it is safe for you to do so. We will be short-staffed due to the weather and road conditions, so service may be slow! But we are serving! If you live close by and want to help, and it's safe for you to travel to us, volunteers are welcome!

12/29/2025

There will be no lunch meal served today, Monday, due to the weather and road conditions. Please check back later for updates about our evening meal service!

11/29/2025

We will be closed today due to the weather.

11/23/2025

Our free Thanksgiving meal is this Wednesday! All are welcome!

11/19/2025

Thank you to HyVee and your Mason City team, and to our wonderful community, for this generous gift! These free bags of groceries were given to our neighbors experiencing food insecurity, and were critical in helping us meet the growing hunger needs of our community. On behalf of the individuals and families we serve at The Community Kitchen, THANK YOU!!

11/12/2025

Thank you Walmart and your Mason City team for helping us feed our neighbors in need!

We are happy to be able to provide the Community Kitchen of North lowa with a grant! Thank you for your incredible dedication and hard work serving our community; we hope this support will help you continue your essential mission!

walmart.onelink.me/UIev/WalmartLocal

10/29/2025

If you, or someone you know, is struggling with hunger or food insecurity right now, The Community Kitchen is here to help!

08/04/2025

We could use some extra help this week and next! If you have an hour to give, and can do a little lifting, we need you! Help sort food donations, or run our fancy dish sanitizer machine! Any help is appreciated! Send us a message, or email us at [email protected]

01/11/2025

Sharing some pretty amazing statistics. Over the past 5 years, the need for our services has skyrocketed. Right now, we are serving more meals to more people than any other year in our 43 years of service to our community.

A little history for those who don't know our origin story... The Community Kitchen began its mission in 1982, when a group of concerned community members and religious leaders worked together with the purpose of helping their neighbors impacted by the farm crisis and local plant closings, by providing a free hot meal service in the community. Since then, we have expanded our services as the needs of our community have grown. We offer 10 weekly meal services now, all with dine-in and carryout options, in an effort to provide meals that are more accessible to people in need. But as before, there are no dues or fees for our services and a free meal is provided to all who need them.

Though some things have changed over the years, or goal has remained the same: to provide for the hunger needs of our neighbors in need. We have been successful in our mission for 43 years because of another constant: the unwavering support from our community. As we look back at our efforts in 2024, we are amazed by what our community accomplished. Community support through food and monetary donations, grants, and service work from many wonderful volunteers provided 123,815 free meals to 1,628 of our neighbors in need. Warm meals were provided 10 times each week, helping feed 282 children in our community through the year. The number of children we are serving now has more than tripled in the last 5 years.

The increase in need has not yet plateaued. As people continue to struggle with hunger and food insecurity in our community, we expect to serve even more meals to more people in 2025. We hope you all will join our efforts this year to help feed our neighbors in need. As the past years have shown us, amazing things can be accomplished with the support of our wonderful community!

A majority of the food served by The Community Kitchen is donated by local supermarkets, grocery stores, hospitals, restaurants, wholesalers, bakeries, civic-minded groups, gardeners, and individual contributors.