Plowshares is a nonprofit organization that has been providing free hot meals and other services to the hungry and homeless since 1983 in Ukiah, California. Ukiah is located about two hours north of San Francisco on U.S. Highway 101. Plowshares relies almost entirely on local donations and the invaluable help of dedicated volunteers to run its Community Dining Room, Homeless Services, and Meals-on-Wheels programs with very little government funding.

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Plowshares Community Dining Room serves a free hot meal every weekday lunch and dinner, open to all, with no questions asked. Seniors and families with small children are served at a separate, early seating. Most of the food used in these meals is donated by local food producers and retailers, and most of the work is done by volunteers. Our Community Dining Room serves over 60,000 meals a year.

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Meals-on-Wheels  provides hot nutritious meals to hundreds of  disabled, homebound seniors in the Ukiah area. It also provides a daily social and welfare check-in for seniors who are often alone all day otherwise. Plowshares delivers about 23,000 Meals-on-Wheels annually.

Plowshares Homeless Services, free to the homeless only, include: use of a telephone, mailing address and message service; voicemailboxes, haircuts, socks, diapers, dog food, etc.; resource/referral information, and outreach services.

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Plowshares Food Share Program allows us to share surplus donated food with other local agencies. This food, which would otherwise go to waste, becomes a tax deduction for the local retailers who donated, a primary source of bounty for our food programs, and is made available at extremely low share of cost to other local agencies, such as the Ukiah Community Center's Food Bank, that serve very low-income clientele. So our Food Share program is a win-win-win arrangement.

These local retailers donate food and/or services on a regular basis:

•  Lucky Foods
•  Mendocino Food and Nutrition (Fort Bragg Food Bank)
•  Mountain Valley Printing
•  Pleasant View Dairy
•  Food Max
•  Raley's Supermarket
•  Redwood Empire Food Bank (Santa Rosa)
•  Schat's Bakeries
•  Starbuck's
•  Ukiah Natural Foods
•  Ukiah Paper Supply
•  Wal-Mart
•  Walgreens

Our generous community makes our services possible. Program revenue in Fiscal Year 2011-12 was:

• Community donations
(this is you!) 89%
• United Way and other grants 7%
• Government sources 4%
• Other Income less than .5%

 “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.”

— Isaiah 2:4

Contact Us

Plowshares
1346 South State Street
P.O. Box 475
Ukiah, CA   95482

tel. 707-462-8582
fax 707-462-0320

plowshares@pacific.net

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