Kroc Center Suisun City

The Story Of The Ray & Joan Kroc Center

The 65,000 square foot Suisun City Kroc Center is one of 26 Kroc Centers open and operating nationwide. In 1998, Joan Kroc, widow of McDonald's CEO Ray Kroc, donated $90 million to the Salvation Army to build a comprehensive community center in San Diego, California. Her wish was to create a 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.

When Joan Kroc died in October 2003, she left $1.5 billion, much of her estate, to The Salvation Army, by far the largest charitable gift ever given to the Army, and the largest single gift given to any charity at one time. The initial disbursements of this bequest began in January 2005. The gift had by then grown to $1.8 billion and was split evenly among the four Army Territories - Central, East, South and West. The money was designated to build a series of state-of-the-art Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Centers nationwide patterned after the San Diego center,