Catholic Community Services of Utah was presented with the Downtown Alliance Downtown Creator Award on July 15. Accepting the award were Randy Chappell, director of the basic needs program; Rose Olivas, director of contracts; Jeff Stant, kitchen manager; Alsiha Pert, operations manager; Kearstin Fernandez, marketing director; Courtney Schriever, volunteer supervisor; and Austin Gordon, culinary instructor. IC photo/Marie MischelSALT LAKE CITY — Catholic Community Services was recognized as a “critical services provider” during the 2026 State of Downtown celebration at the Salt Lake City Public Library on July 15. 
The event, hosted by the Downtown Alliance, presented several Downtown Creator Awards in various categories.
The award has been given each year for the past 35 years to individuals or organizations that contribute to the downtown Salt Lake City area. Individual CCS staff members have received the award in the past, but this was the first time that the organization itself has been recognized for its work.
Among those attending the July 15 ceremony were Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall, Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson, and members of the city and county councils.
As he introduced Catholic Community Services, Dee Brewer, Downtown Alliance’s executive director, spoke of the people who call the downtown area their home. Last year, the residential population of downtown Salt Lake City grew 9 percent, “and it is up 63 percent since 2019,” he said, adding that “our residents are the first customers that downtown welcomes every morning, and these urban dwellers stand out among their Wasatch Front peers.”
Of those who live downtown, 55 percent are in their 20s, 57 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The downtown workforce is the most educated in the region – 53 percent hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, a better percentage than that in nearby metropolitan areas such as Denver, Phoenix, Reno and Boise, Brewer said.
“But let me offer this: You cannot only measure downtown by the people who are thriving there. We must measure downtown and the city by how we treat the people who are having the hardest day of their lives on the sidewalk,” Brewer added. “One in 11 Utahns will face food insecurity, and every single day an organization answers this challenge with a meal and with a ‘hello.’”
A video that followed highlighted CCS’ Saint Vincent de Paul Dining Hall and the Weigand Resource Center, which provide resources for people experiencing homelessness, including daytime shelter, case management, showers and laundry services, among other services. Both facilities are in downtown Salt Lake City. 
The video also featured the Vincent’s Kitchen Academy, which operates out of the resource center and kitchen, and trains “individuals facing employment barriers for a job as a mid-level cook at a restaurant upon graduation,” according to the CCS website.
The Weigand Center becomes a bridge that provides “a relationship between those who have and those who have not,” Bishop Oscar A. Solis said in the video.    
In the last fiscal year the St. Vincent dining hall provided 713,173 meals for the downtown location as well as six other homeless resource centers in the Salt Lake area. In the same time period, the Weigand Resource Center served 83,707 clients. 
“When we see high numbers, we know that there’s more people in need and more people that need to get help,” said Randy Chappell, director of basic needs at CCS, in the video. “It’s more of the individuals behind those numbers and how we can support them.”
The CCS staff focuses “on what is the need of the client for that moment – if it’s employment, if it’s housing, if it’s laundry services, if it’s just taking a shower, if it’s a computer lab,” Chappell said. “And there’s the long-term case management that we also provide.”
Rather than reducing people in need to a statistic or a number, it makes sense “to see homelessness and all those kinds of sufferings and miseries around us not as problems to be solved but as an opportunity to be able to be able to respond, you know, with kindness and compassion and love,” Bishop Solis said at the end of the video. “This will not be solved by one institution. It takes a village – that’s what they say. It takes unity and solidarity. By pooling our resources, putting our hearts together, dirtying our hands together, you know, to confront it. Yeah. It takes a family.” 
Other recipients of this year’s Downtown Creator Award were Angela Brown, executive director of Slug magazine and founder of the DIY Festival; Stephen Brown, founder of SB Dance; Omar Jamhour, owner of The Peoples Coffee and The Blocks Barbershop; Jorge Fierro, owner and founder of Rico Brands; and Salt Lake County Deputy Mayor Erin Litvack.