The two-year-old Kroc Center in Omaha, NE, sits in the middle of an economically challenged neighborhood, providing educational and fitness options to the community. Photo courtesy of Omaha Kroc Center.

On the southeast side of Omaha, NE, on land once occupied by companies in Omaha’s fabled meat-packing industry and largely populated by lower-income people, sits a gleaming, two-year old, 122,000-square-foot building that draws praise from community developers, charitable groups and thousands of members, while working some fitness club owners into a hot, frothing sweat.

Omaha’s Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center—known locally as the Kroc Center—is one of 27 such facilities either already built or in the planning and construction stages nationwide. All are made possible due to a $1.5 billion posthumous donation by Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc, to the Salvation Army in 2003. In Omaha, as at other Kroc Centers throughout the country, the stated mission of the centers is to provide a comprehensive community center, supported in part by the community, where children and families would be exposed to different people, activities and arts that would otherwise be beyond their reach. Kroc Centers are patterned after the initial Kroc Center in San Diego, which Joan Kroc funded and helped design and build while still alive. San Diego’s Kroc Center sits on 12 acres and includes an ice arena, gymnasium, three pools, rock-climbing walls, a performing arts theatre, an Internet-based library computer lab and a school of visual and performing arts.

Supporters exult in the opportunities and activities that Kroc Centers provide that are beyond the economic and physical reach of lower-income residents near each center. Detractors see a resplendent new fitness center coming into their cities, cloaked in the patina of philanthropy and all the good works for which the Salvation Army has historically been known.

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