!Feliz Aniversario! Our Lady of Guadalupe Center

Last May, through the support of partners and donors, an expanded Our Lady of Guadalupe Center began to fulfill its promise to help more people in the Columbus area.
From 1999 to 2016, the Guadalupe Center functioned primarily as a food pantry, but in May 2017, Catholic Social Services opened an expanded 3,500-square-foot facility on Columbus’ west side at 409 Industry Drive.

The facility is nearly three times its former size and, as a result, has increased its services in the community. With more space, partnerships and staffing, the center is now focused on providing and strengthening “deeper” wrap-around services to clients in addition to maintaining the food pantry. Those include partnering with local organizations to provide services such as job skills training and job-mentoring classes, English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, nutrition classes, preventive health screenings, and legal and immigration consultations and referrals. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe Center is the only agency in Franklin County offering holistic services and a food pantry to the growing immigrant Hispanic population. It is located in the heart of Columbus’ largest concentration of Hispanics, where, according to the Ohio Development Services Agency’s report on poverty, the overall poverty rate is 43 percent and the child poverty rate is 49 percent.

The objective is to stabilize Hispanic immigrants, to empower them to break out of poverty, and to integrate these families into the wider Columbus community, where they have so much to offer.

The food pantry brings people to the center, but it is the other services that address the root causes of poverty and empower clients to break the cycle of poverty. An additional goal is to help ensure that the same families will not return to the center a year later experiencing the same crises and poverty.

Through the gift of a generous bequest, the center has also hired a full-time bilingual case manager who started work in June.

To learn more about the work of Catholic Social Services and Our Lady of Guadalupe Center, visit colscss.org or call 614-340-7061.