Community of Flint Works Together Through North End Soup Kitchen to Serve Residents
Lindsay Knake
| 4 min read
Lindsay Knake is a brand journalist for Blue Cross B...
The North End Soup Kitchen in Flint serves two hot meals twice a day every single day. And since October 2024, the kitchen offers cold food in a reach-in refrigerator.
“It’s a wonderful addition to what we do for clients,” said John Manse, community service director at Catholic Charities of Shiawassee and Genesee Counties. “It’s a way for us to give these families more than just all the bread.”
The Catholic Charities of Genesee and Shiawassee Counties is comprised of more than 3,000 charities that offer meal programs, counseling, educational classes and programs, emergency shelter, housing assistance and more. They have another soup kitchen in Flint and one in Owosso. A community closet in downtown Flint gives away 50,000 personal needs items and receives 450,000 pieces of clothing each month.
The organization also has the Mid-Michigan ReSource Warehouse, which is one of three in Michigan. This community redistribution center offers small appliances, clothes, toys and other items to nonprofits and educators for very low fees, and the profits go back to the soup kitchens.
The North End Soup Kitchen received the reach-in refrigerator in 2024 thanks to a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan grant to address food insecurity in Genesee and Shiawassee counties. The soup kitchen offers tables of personal needs items and shelf-stable food. Manse said they had set out cold items for people to take but were limited in what they could offer.
Now, when people come for a hot meal or items from the food pantry, they can also get fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, lunch meat and sandwiches. From October through April, the North End Soup Kitchen gave away 8,063 refrigerated items.
Last year, the North End Soup Kitchen served more than 36,000 people during lunch and dinner. With their sack lunch program, they gave away 77,000 total meals on the North side of Flint. The soup kitchen also serves as a nightly warming center for women and children in the winter months, and they served another 5,770 hot meals in 2024-2025.
The North End Soup Kitchen is a true community organization. The staff works with local restaurants and businesses to collect food from lunch meats to sandwiches to pallets of fruit and vegetables.
“The businesses have the passion to do a little bit of extra work and save it for us. We make an effort to show up every week and pick it up,” Manse said. “We’ve seen a big difference in our donations since we got the refrigerator.”
Volunteers also keep people fed. Manse said the soup kitchen works with students from 90 schools and colleges such as nearby Flushing and Lake Fenton. So many people have wanted to volunteer, the soup kitchen added a second shift in the early 2000s.The volunteering is generational, too. Manse said he’s known people who’ve been coming since they were kids, and now as adults they bring their own children to volunteer.
“Nobody should go hungry or without food in Flint,” Manse said. “It’s the community itself, and that’s what keeps us alive. That’s what’s special.”
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan has a mission to increase access and enhance the quality of care for every Michiganian. Through the 20 years of the Strengthening the Safety Net grant program, we have invested more than $17 million into safety net clinics, improved patient outcomes and kept people from expensive emergency room visits, which lower health care costs for everyone. Blue Cross has reduced the number of unnecessary emergency room visits by 400,000 and saved the health care system $200 million by helping patients avoid unnecessary emergency room visits.
Learn more about how Blue Cross is making health care more affordable here.
Image: Courtesy of North End Soup Kitchen
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