Our History
In 1991, when Charles Robbins returned to Denver from Los Angeles, he found that friends living with HIV/AIDS were wasting away before his eyes. He founded Project Angel Heart in response, modeling it after Project Angel Food, a Los Angeles organization where he had been a volunteer.
At first, Charles and a group of friends solicited food from local restaurants and distributed it on the weekends. Project Angel Heart’s first meal was a pan of lasagna donated by Racine’s restaurant and delivered to 12 clients. Soon, we needed our own kitchen, and St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Capitol Hill welcomed and embraced us.
Charles Robbins (left) packs meals in St. Barnabas’ kitchen.
Project Angel Heart grew steadily over the next three years. By 1994, we were preparing and delivering meals six days per week. In 1996, we moved to a larger kitchen in Our Savior’s Lutheran Church to keep up with the growth in demand for our services.
By 1999, the need for home delivered meals for people living with other serious illnesses like cancer and congestive heart failure became too great to ignore, so Project Angel Heart expanded our mission. This expansion required more physical space than was available in the Our Savior’s Lutheran Church kitchen, so community members raised $600,000 for Project Angel Heart to relocate to a spacious, modern, affordable, and easy-to-clean kitchen in Northeast Denver in 2001.
Project Angel Heart continued to grow, converting to a primarily frozen meal delivery system that year and launching service in Colorado Springs in 2005.
Our program’s growth caused us to run out of space again in 2007, so we launched a campaign to raise the funds needed to buy and renovate a 30,000 square foot facility in Denver’s Globeville neighborhood. Thanks to generous partners in the community, we met our $7.1 million campaign goal, designed our state-of-the-art kitchen, and moved to our new home at 4950 Washington Street in 2012.
In 2018, Project Angel Heart’s first in-depth research project, which investigated the impact of medically tailored meals on hospitalization rates and health care costs, helped spur tremendous growth for the organization. Data from the project demonstrated that Project Angel Heart meals were effective in decreasing the rate of hospital readmission for clients and showed that most clients saw significant decreases in monthly health care costs while receiving our meals. In late 2018, we made a strategic decision to increase the number of meals we provided to clients from five to seven. Thanks to a generous donation, we were able to increase meals by 40% in a short time.
2020 brought challenges around the world, and in our community. The COVID-19 pandemic required significant changes to our operations. We suspended many volunteer shifts, closed our offices to visitors, and put in place strict health and safety measures. We delivered shelf-stable emergency meals to clients to ensure no one would go hungry if meal deliveries were disrupted. We implemented efficiencies in every part of our program to help ensure we could meet growing demand. Fortunately, we didn’t miss one meal during the pandemic.
During that difficult year, we lost our friend and Executive Chef Brandon Foster. Brandon’s family and friends funded a fellowship in his name to support future kitchen staff.
Over the past two years, we have undertaken the most significant expansion of our program in our history. With transformational support from partner Kaiser Permanente, we have doubled our delivery area to more than 1,600 square miles along the Front Range.
In fall 2024, we’ll add Greeley, Fort Collins, and Loveland, helping us achieve our strategic goal of home-delivering medically tailored meals to 75% of the Front Range Urban Corridor.