For the past two years, the Kansas City Atheist Coalition has volunteered with the Kansas City Rescue Mission to deliver meals to those in need on Thanksgiving, and then later collected gift donations for an adopted family at a December holiday party.

Things this year, however, aren’t going to be quite the same – we’ve got some good news, and we’ve got some bad news.

The good news is that we are definitely still adopting a family for the holidays. Due to the closeness of Thanksgiving to December, though, we’re opting to use our Thanksgiving dinner event to collect donations. If you can’t make the dinner, don’t worry – we’ll work out a way for you to make your donations! To make up for the lack of a holiday party at which to collect donations, we’re going to also put together a white elephant gift party.

The bad news is that we aren’t likely to have a volunteer event. The reason is unfortunate: Kansas City Rescue Mission has decided to use the meals they deliver as a chance to proselytize to its recipients by inserting religious literature into the meals. They informed us that we “would not be a good fit” (emphasis theirs) for volunteering with them, and declined to respond to any further inquiries. We can only speculate at their motivation behind this; we’ve made it a pretty good show before:

The further unfortunate truth of this is that they waited until after we had spent roughly a month trying to get a hold of them to tell us they would not be accepting our offer to help volunteer. That’s put us on such short notice that we’re having trouble organizing a Thanksgiving Day volunteer event – we’re trying, but the other organizations we’ve been looking at are full up. We wouldn’t ask anyone to hold their breaths.

In the meantime, let’s focus on the upcoming fun of the holidays – a great turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and a fun white elephant party! You can find more details about the Thanksgiving dinner on our site here. Hope to see you there!