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During the COVID-19 pandemic, he launched a second Feed Your Soul in Janesville, as an outreach of Faith Community Church, 2931 Lucerne Dr., on the city’s east side. It became its own nonprofit in 2023.

Combined, the Janesville and Fort Atkinson sites now prepare about 800 hot meals each week, that are available for drive-thru pickup on Tuesdays in outside Faith Community Church and on Thursdays outside First United Methodist Church. Pickup hours are 4:30 to 6 p.m. at both locations.

Christian outreach

Faith is a critical part of Feed Your Soul’s equation; meal pickup is accompanied by prayers and other Christian outreach.

Meals in both Fort Atkinson and Janesville are available to anyone regardless of their income, including those who “just might be just a busy mom, grandparents, or even people just looking for company,” noted volunteer Vicki Bachmeye.

Between both sites combined, a team of about 350 volunteers puts in over 8,000 volunteer hours annually, and Lowry sees demand rising. If called upon to do so, he thinks the two sites could handle a jump to 1,000 combined meals a week.

Rising need

The 800 weekly meals marks an uptick from about 700 earlier this year, noted Lowry, president of both the Janesville and Fort Atkinson Feed Your Soul nonprofits.

Lowry, who lives in Milton and is the retired president of Jones Dairy Farm in Fort Atkinson, said that this year inflation, uncertainty over federal SNAP food aid payments, uncertainty about health care benefits, and other financial stressors, have hit many area families hard.

“Food is getting increasingly unaffordable. There’s less and less in your cart,” per dollar, agreed John Wells, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Fort Atkinson, who serves on the board of the Fort Atkinson Feed Your Soul and who played a key role in its founding.

Fort Atkinson Feed Your Soul

The Fort Atkinson Feed Your Soul began as a weekly sit-down meal, borne out of a conversation between Wells, Rick Lowry and Lowry’s wife, Jennifer, who was in the food ingredient business.

Initially, it was suggested they serve one meal per month.

“(Wells) said, ‘I was really envisioning this thing to be a weekly meal,’ and we go, ‘Oh, wow, we need to pray a little harder on that one,’” Lowry recalls.

They took up the challenge. The first sit-down dinner drew 24 people.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic and an unexpected surge. A shift from a sit-down to a drive-through model unexpectedly quadrupled their reach.

“When we started doing drive-up we started serving over 100 people, almost double,” Lowry recalls.

The drive-up model, which includes a personal check-in, remained Fort Atkinson’s mode after the pandemic, and was replicated in Janesville.

In Fort Atkinson, for those without reliable transportation, Fort Atkinson Feed Your Soul pays Brown Cab Company to pick people up to collect their meals, and returns them home.

Janesville Feed Your Soul doesn’t have a transportation service to get people to and from its meal pickup site.

Janesville Feed Your Soul

The expansion into Rock County in 2023 was borne out of a conversation between Rick and Jennifer Lowry and Pastor Jeff Williams of Faith Community Church in Janesville.

Lowry told Williams that such a program required a commercial kitchen. He pushed Faith Community Church to add that onto its building, at an estimated cost of $750,000.

“The church board looked at (Lowry) and said, ‘How are you going to pay for this?’” Williams recalls. “And he said, ‘I don’t know. I guess we have to trust in God.’”

In the end, the funds were successfully raised with major support from corporate and private donors, including Jones Dairy Farm.

The kitchen’s construction sadly became a memorial for Jennifer Lowry, who was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer on her husband’s birthday in August 2023. Lowry retired from Jones Dairy Farm to care for her and to finish the work on the kitchen. She passed away in June 2024, living long enough to see the kitchen rise.

“It was always her vision to do this,” Lowry shared.

Lowry, in now running both nonprofits full-time, said his effort and those of others ensures “her dream continues to thrive and come true.”

More than a meal

There are meal programs for those in need that satisfy hunger. Feed Your Soul aims to go beyond that, Lowry reflects.

The ministry’s core philosophy: not simply “handing out meals,” Lowry said. It’s about “not just feeding their body, but feeding their soul.”

“The world can be really cold and dark, and we just want to be a source of light, Christ’s light to our community. And food is one way to do that,” Williams agreed.

Building relationships is central to the mission.

Volunteers like Steve Schulte and Bachmeye, who both cite their faith as their motivation, talk with guests in their cars, taking their names, offering a prayer, and building trust.

“We use food as an opportunity to share the word of God with them. And that’s what separates us from a food kitchen,” Lowry said.

Volunteers write down pickup line prayer requests — from a sister’s illness to a dog’s poor health — and follow up on the requests the next week.

Pet food

Lowry, out of his own pocket, funds dog and cat food as part of meal pickup for those with pets.

“If I don’t give them dog or cat food, and they have dogs or cats, they’re feeding their dogs their food, because they love them like family,” Lowry said. That, Lowry said, diminishes the nutritional value for any people in their household they’re picking up a meal for.

Community partners

In Fort Atkinson, the school district has joined the effort.

Fort Atkinson High School culinary students use their class hours to prepare large batches of food, including some of the 130 dozen desserts needed weekly. Lowry provides the ingredients.

“They made 51 batches of chocolate chip cookies last week for me,” Lowry said.

And Feed Your Soul has found other pockets of need that it’s helping to fill.

In some Rock County high schools, it prepares a carb-heavy homemade meal for students who take part in Release Time, which is 90 minutes per week for religious studies, allowed for in Wisconsin state law. Release time meals are currently offered at Craig High School in Janesville, Clinton High School and Milton High School, with plans to soon expand to Parker High School/.

The future

New ways of reaching those in need of a hot meal are on Feed Your Soul’s radar.

Next spring it plans to launch a new service, Compassion in Action, that relies on custom-built vans with warming ovens and a refrigerator to bring hot meals, fruit, and essential dry goods like socks and deodorant directly to the homeless and those in high-need areas of Rock County. The plan is to connect with those who could use the service via text, to alert them to when a van will be in their area.

Feed Your Soul is also growing into South Beloit, expecting to launch a hot meal service there in January in an expanded kitchen at Faith Fellowship, 1401 Blackhawk Blvd.

And it has a long-term vision is for a tiny home community for the homeless, modeled after efforts undertaken by a nonprofit in Austin, Texas.

Feed Your Soul relies heavily on in-kind and financial donations, with 100% of contributions spent on food and supplies. Major partners currently include Jones Dairy Farm and Woodman’s Markets. Donations can be made and more information is at .