Poverty Prevention - Intervention - Advocacy Our Sponsors
What We Do
The Well in the Desert is an organization created for humanitarian reasons, to help feed, clothe and assist people in need; the homeless, the elderly poor, and the working poor. It was created to fill a vacuum of inadequate social services, and has been doing all the above for twelve years.

The Well in the Desert was founded by Dr. Wayne McKinny, a retired pediatrician known for his "Operation Baby Lift" during the Vietnam War. His vision was to help improve the lives of those in need, and that is what we, the Board, along with all of our wonderful volunteers and staff does on a daily basis.

We offer a daily hot meal program to over 175 people a day seven days a week. We provide client services daily; mail and phone services, computer lab for job and housing search, toiletries, clothes, furniture, linkage services for veterans, seniors and families. Every Saturday we operate our food distribution program that serves seniors, 20%, disabled, 5%, families with children/low income, 55%, and unmarried couples and individuals without children/low-income, 20%. We are able through this program to augment food to over 2000 people and month and help people not to have to choose between food and rent. We serve people on a budget of less than $340,000.00 and 86% of that goes directly to client services.

During the summer we are open as a Riverside County Cooling Center seven days a week. We see upwards of over 100 people daily who have no other place to go. Tuesday we have a big screen movie presented by the MCC Church and on Wednesday's we have bingo, also done by volunteers from the Metropolitan Community Church.

The Well in the Desert works with local businesses to help keep homeless people from having a negative impact on business and through our program called Well Assist make attempts to stop panhandling and vagrancy.

We are proud of our services for the good of the entire community and proud of our positive relationships throughout the entire valley.

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Poverty Prevention - Intervention - Advocacy