The Full Story
About
Love Your Neighbor is the outreach department for The City Church NWA. You may know it better as the Free Food Truck. Each year we serve thousands of people food and attend dozens of community events to partner with our city. The City Church name is a reflection of our commitment to serve our city with the love and generosity of Jesus Christ. Our mission as a church is to help people connect to, grow in, and serve God. We feel like the free food truck helps us better achieve our mission. We hope you have been blessed by Love Your Neighbor in the past or make plans to join us in the future.
Why We started the free food truck
Back in 2016 we had a meeting and asked the question... "What is the biggest need for our community?" We kept hearing about food insecurity in the schools and how families often go without food. The first idea was to start a food pantry but we quickly realized that we didn't have room to facilitate such a large undertaking. (Maybe Someday!) We decided to pray about it and a few weeks later someone said "What about a food truck?" It was too perfect! A food truck would help meet a temporary need, build community and get us out of our building. We pulled together $2000, bought our first trailer, and began going into neighborhoods. This helped us feed families but we never had the room to build community. Now we meet in the parks here in Springdale and sit around tables with people. We love seeing people from all different walks of life sit together and break bread.
Vision
The vision of the food truck is to feed people, build community and start relationships. We know that sometimes life is busy and you need a break. We also understand that sometimes it's hard to afford a meal for your family. That is where we come into play. We want to take that off your plate for one night a month. We also believe that it's beneficial for Springdale to have a strong, peaceful, and loving community. When you come to our events we want you to feel the love that fills us. Ultimately we hope to build a relationship with people so they feel like they are a part of our church family. If someone walks into the doors of our church because of a free meal we all celebrate like we just won the lottery.
Fill The Gap
As we continue to grow the Love Your Neighbor nights we hope to add to what we offer. City Youth started serving snow cones last year and now we have added another ministry called "Fill The Gap". This ministry is designed to fill the gap between what a family needs and what WIC allows a family to purchase with it's funds. We can't help every family but we do help a lot of families each time we go out.
Who Pays For All This?
Well... we do. The church gives generously and we always have enough to share. We try to get donations from businesses when we can but the majority of the food that goes out of the window of the free food truck is paid for by the people serving it. If you would like to help feed people you could give to the love your neighbor ministry on our donate page. Any gift would be greatly appriciated.
We call these events City Nights
