When the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center opened in San Diego, California in 2003, the storefront vacancy rate on University Avenue exceeded 50%. It was less than 5% two years after the opening, recalled Cindy Foley, who served as the San Diego’s center’s first administrator.
The economic shot in the arm from the $57 million construction project was just the beginning. The more than 2,500 people who soon began going through the center’s doors each day, totaling an estimated 1.2 million visits per year, had an immediate financial community impact.
It started with an idea. Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald fast-food chain entrepreneur Ray Kroc, provided $94 million of seed money to The Salvation Army for a unique community center — 200,000 square feet of indoor space on 12.4 acres in what was then one of the most blighted urban neighborhoods in America. The center opened a few months after she died but the concept and process were so impressive to her that Kroc left the Salvation Army a $1.8 billion bequest to build between 25 and 30 centers.
There are now 26 centers up and running.
Kroc’s vision was a center for recreation, education, and the arts whose economic and social impact would reverberate throughout the Krocs’ hometown of San Diego like a “like a shining light upon a hill,” according to Foley. Built on the site of a shuttered shopping mall in the Rolando neighborhood, it includes a fitness center with a National Hockey League-sized ice skating arena, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and two other pools, rock-climbing walls, and a full-sized gymnasium. There’s also an education building, performing arts theatre, library, computer lab, classrooms, daycare facilities, accompanied by a park-like setting of landscaped gardens and walking paths.
It so transformed the surrounding neighborhood that it became a model for the 25 additional Kroc Centers built under The Salvation Army’s auspices.
Annual direct spending on goods and services in the neighborhood surrounding the San Diego center increased $7.8 million in the years immediately following its opening with the total “multiplier effect” of economic and social value reaching $30.1 million annually, according to Foley.
City officials who were considering designating the neighborhood a business enterprise zone in hopes of spurring its economic renewal soon forgot all about those plans. “Because of the San Diego Kroc Center, the financial impact was so great that they didn’t have to do anything else,” said Foley, who now commander of The Salvation Army’s Northwest Division and based in Seattle, Washington.
Those who were on the ground when the Kroc Center opened in San Diego witnessed the transformation. Across the street, in the middle of a “food desert,” a new grocery store opened a few months after the center was completed. A sporting goods store and Starbucks followed. The formerly vacant commercial and office space nearby began filling up, bringing still more jobs to a formerly neglected part of the city that was suddenly humming with commerce.
“The impact of 1.2 million people coming through this one location each year spurred businesses, restaurants, coffee shops, service industry businesses like auto repair, and others selling everything from groceries to used ice skates to a neighborhood where people had been fleeing it before,” said Foley.
This was no accident. It was the vision of Joan Kroc that the center bearing her family’s name would not only provide recreational, educational and growth opportunities to people of all ages living in poverty but would also become an engine for economic growth and job creation. Leaders of The Salvation Army had never previously managed a project of this scale, but so pleased was Joan Kroc with their stewardship of it that unbeknownst to them, she had decided to entrust the charity with the $1.8 billion gift for future centers.
“One of the last things I remember Joan telling me was how she wanted her gift to demonstrate to the world her trust in The Salvation Army,” recalled Foley of their final visit. “I thought she was referring to the fact that she had already given us $94 million, not knowing that 10 days later I would learn she had passed away and had given the remainder of her estate to The Salvation Army.”
The $1.8 billion bequest was the largest gift given to a single charity known at that time and set off a frenzy of interest from dozens of communities vying to be considered for Kroc Centers. During the next few years, ground was broken on 25 more Kroc Centers in urban, suburban and rural locations spanning the mainland United States, as well as Hawaii and Puerto Rico. All remain in operation today.
“The most important aspect for our Kroc Centers is that they were very deliberately placed in underserved communities,” explained Dale Bannon, national community relations and development secretary for The Salvation Army. “They were designed to serve primarily families who live in poverty with an opportunity for wellness, the arts, job training, after-school care, senior care, and more. Communities rallied behind the projects because they desperately needed it.”
The transformation that followed in these communities was borne out by the results of an economic impact study that The Salvation Army commissioned upon the 10-year anniversary of the first Kroc Center’s opening. A team of experts from research consultancy McClanahan Associates, based in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and nonsectarian technical support group Partners for Sacred Places, headquartered in Philadelphia, conducted the study in partnership with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice.
The 28-page report, The Economic Halo Effect of the Ray and Joan Kroc Corps and Community Centers, was released in 2015. Researchers at the time found the average Kroc Center employed 32 full-time staff and 92 part-time staff. Total direct economic value provided by all 26 centers was calculated at $269 million annually, or $350 million in current dollars. The figure included the economic benefit to community businesses selling goods and services to the centers and the benefit to residents employed by the centers.
Also in the report was the value of recreational, educational, arts and other programs offered in many cases at reduced or no cost to those using the centers, 14% of whom were categorized as low-income and 13% as very low-income. Community economic benefit and transformation remain central to the Kroc Centers mission, the effects of which Salvation Army leaders will revisit when they conduct the next planned study two years from now.
It was with this in mind that Salvation Army leaders included community transformation among the criteria for deciding where to allocate the remainder of Joan Kroc’s gift for other centers following the opening in San Diego. “There were a number of standards and narrative reports that we required applicants to give,” said Ralph Bukiewicz, currently national chief secretary of The Salvation Army, who presided over the opening of the Kroc Center in Chicago in 2012. “There were 32 different elements they had to address from programming elements to sustainability to community collaboration and ultimately how the community would be transformed if a Kroc Center was built there.”
Numerous communities — including Detroit to Long Beach, California and Staten Island, New York — were unable to advance in the process, often through no fault leadership. In some cases, it was because the land chosen for a center was deemed unsuitable. In other cases, zoning variances were needed that officials determined were unlikely to be granted. “The average application took about 18 months to complete, and all costs associated with preparing it were reimbursed. But, needless to say, there were a number of communities that were very disappointed,” Bukiewicz said. “They put in a lot of time and effort into their applications and being rejected didn’t necessarily mean their application was weak. But we wanted to make sure each Kroc Center would be successful and sustainable and had all the other elements we had asked for.”
Kroc Centers today budget from about $5 million per year at the smallest center in Ashland, Ohio, which has about 20,000 square feet of indoor space, to nearly $14 million at the largest centers in San Diego, Chicago, and Honolulu, all of which top out around 200,000 square feet of indoor space. Payroll expenses constitute approximately 55% to 60% of each center’s budget.
Differences in the amenities offered by the various centers are often by design and were based on a study of unmet community needs prior to construction. “This is why Hawaii chose to have baseball fields, because there was not enough baseball field space in that part of Oahu. When San Diego did our needs assessment, we didn’t need more baseball fields but there were nowhere near enough swimming pools or ice skating access in the whole southern half of San Diego County,” Foley explained. “There also wasn’t enough gym space, especially for girls and for those with disabilities.”
Half or more of the portion of Joan Kroc’s gift allocated to each center is set aside for an endowment to pay for facilities upkeep and some program and operating expenses. Income from the endowment provides a significant portion of each center’s funding with the balance coming from Salvation Army fundraising, including the annual Red Kettle holiday campaign and program and membership fees from those who can afford to pay. Memberships and day passes are offered on a sliding scale based on income with scholarships available to the most economically needy. The policy is in keeping with Joan Kroc’s mission to create a transformative community center where children and families would be exposed to different people, activities and arts that would otherwise be beyond their reach.
“A lot of times when people say a family doesn’t have opportunity, we quickly think financial hardship,” Foley said. “That’s a big part of it, but distance and lack of transportation are also factors in why some people never have an opportunity to try out and learn new things.”
Such was the case for Brett Ryan, who experienced ice skating for the first time in his life at the San Diego Kroc Center when he was 13 years old and became a champions skater within a year’s time. Ryan’s mom had begun exercising in the center’s warm water therapy pool while recovering from back surgery, during which he liked to rollerblade in a nearby skatepark. “He tried on a pair of ice skates one day in November because the skateboard park was closed, liked it, realized he was good at it, went through all our classes, began skating competitively and was one of the top-ranked pairs figure skaters in the United States by the following November,” Foley said.
A young woman had a similar experience after enrolling in the culinary arts training program at a Kroc Center in Boston. “She graduated from the program in December 2019 and said it was the most wonderful thing that happened to her life, and now she owns her own catering business,” Bannon said.
One of Joan Kroc’s final gifts was a solid bronze Henry Moore sculpture valued at several million dollars she gave to the San Diego center shortly before passing away. Weighing several tons, the sculpture today forms the centerpiece of what Foley likened to a “secret garden” where aspiring young artists can lose themselves for a time and journey wherever their imaginations take them.
Kroc’s final words to Foley still resonate with her. “She probably knew she would never see me again, though I didn’t know it at the time,” Foley recalled. “And as she was leaving, she pulled my hand and said, ‘I just want to tell you that the Kroc Center coming to San Diego is beyond my wildest dream.’ That’s a direct quote. And I always say Joan Kroc is the biggest dreamer I ever met.”
