Help for a family going through something hard.
Meet Care Rotation, a free tool for churches to look after their people: meals, a food pantry and gift drives. Anyone can say yes in a minute: no account, no password, no app.
Built with love, to show His love, by a church member, for churches.
No ads.
No cut of anything given.
No public list of who is sick,
or who needs food.
Three ways your church looks after people.
Meals
When a family is going through something hard, the meals get covered and their address stays private. Reminders go out by themselves.
Food pantry
Who came, how many you fed, and the numbers your food bank asks for. Tick families off as they get their food — no clipboard.
Switched on when your church wants it.
Gift drives
Christmas, Easter, back to school. Sponsors pick a family’s gifts from a poster or a link, and never see a first name.
Switched on when your church wants it.
Set the dates
Breakfast, lunch or dinner on the days the family needs them, a time for each, and what the family can and can’t eat.
Send one email
Your people tap the link, see which meals are free, and pick one. That’s all they do.
We do the reminding
Each person gets the address and the delivery notes the day before their meal. You see what’s still empty.
What a sign-up sheet can’t do.
None of these are features anybody asks for by name. Each is a way a rotation quietly goes wrong, and each is handled here.
The family’s address isn’t on the page everyone sees.
The shared page carries the meals, the dietary notes and the delivery window — everything somebody needs in order to decide what to cook.
The address and the door instructions go to one person: whoever is bringing that meal, in their reminder the day before. So a link forwarded round a church directory doesn’t carry a family’s front door with it.
It isn’t a vault — anybody holding a link can still open the page, and the person cooking on Thursday genuinely needs the address. What changes is how many people have it: the whole list, or the one person coming to the house.
Not on this page
4:00 pm tomorrow
1411 Sycamore Street
Prairieville, LA 70769
Leave it on the porch — the dog is friendly, gate code 1234.
We ask whether the meal actually arrived.
The day before, whoever is cooking gets a reminder with the address. The morning after, the organizer gets one question about that meal: did it turn up?
It is the only failure in a meal train that nobody can see. An empty slot is obvious to everybody. A meal that was covered and didn’t happen looks exactly like one that went fine — and families very often say nothing, because saying something means telling their church that somebody let them down. So the page stays perfect and nobody ever finds out.
Every other tool in this category counts a claimed meal as a delivered one. Which means the only rotation it can show you is the one on paper.
The meals can open a few at a time.
Fourteen meals go up. The keen people take the first five in one evening, the back half of the rotation sits there, and the family eats alone on day eleven.
It is the most common way one of these quietly fails, and nobody reports it as a problem — they just don’t use the tool again. So you can set a lead time and have each meal appear a week or two before it happens. Everybody still sees the whole rotation. They just can’t take all of it on the first evening.
Nobody takes a meal without reading the allergies.
If the family has written down something they can’t eat, a sign-up won’t go through until the person cooking has said they have read it.
And we keep the words they read, not the fact that they ticked a box. Six weeks later, “Judy ticked a box” is worth nothing and “Judy read: no shellfish” is an answer. It also shows when an acknowledgement has gone out of date — if “no peanuts” was added afterwards, what Judy actually read is still on the record, and it no longer matches.
It is the one thing in a meal train that can put somebody in hospital.
Somebody with no email can still bring a meal.
The person who rings the church office and says put me down for Tuesday, I’ll do a roast. Where signing up is a web page and an invitation is an email address, that person does not exist — and in most congregations they are not a rare case.
Here the organizer puts them down. A name is enough, a phone number is better, and they are on the rotation like everybody else. The record keeps who entered it, so nobody is credited with a sign-up they never made.
You decide how much a taken meal gives away.
A Bible study that eats together every week wants to see names. A bereavement rotation in a large church, where half the list has never met the family, may want a good deal less. It’s one setting, and you pick it when you set the dates.
Nobody gets an automated message about the worst week of their year.
The family a rotation is for never hears from us. Not a welcome email, not a notification, not a receipt. Every other tool in this category signs them up as a user and starts sending; we think that institutional coldness is exactly the wrong note to strike at somebody who has just come home from hospital or buried a parent.
A person asks them. Not a form.
Before anybody can be invited, whoever is organizing has to say they have checked with the family and they are happy for it. That is a conversation, and it happens the way it always has — in a kitchen, in a car park, on the phone.
What the product does is refuse to go ahead until somebody says it happened, and remember who said so. It cannot verify a conversation. It can make sure one was supposed to have taken place before a dozen people learn where a family lives.
If they want to see it, their organizer gives them a link.
Some families want to know what is coming. Some would much rather not think about it. So it is offered rather than sent: the organizer gets a link and passes it on however they actually reach the family — a text, written down, read out over the phone. It works with no account and no email address.
It shows what is coming, who is bringing it, and every detail the church wrote down about them — because it is theirs. There is nothing on it to press. Anything they want changed goes through the person they know by name.
Who came, and how many you fed.
Switched on for your church when you want it. It is the clipboard by the door, with the counting done for you.
Tick families off as they come in.
Regulars from the last six months are listed for the day, and anyone else is a search away. A new family takes one line.
The numbers your food bank asks for.
Each family counted once a month or a year, at its latest size, and how many you prayed with. Print it, or download it.
Kept to the pantry.
Pantry volunteers see the pantry and nothing else, and a family’s record is deleted after five years without a visit.
Print it, or download it for the food bank.
Christmas gifts without the spreadsheet.
Switched on for your church when you want it. Christmas, Easter, back to school — each drive is its own list of families.
A family is a number and a list.
“Family 4: Boy, 8 — winter coat, size 10.” Sponsors never see a first name.
One link, one poster.
Sponsors sign up from a QR poster or a link, take a whole family or a single gift, and get a page with their gifts and the drop-off day.
Ticked as it comes in, thanked at the end.
You tick gifts off as they are dropped off and see who is still waiting. Sponsors get a reminder before drop-off day, a thank-you at the end, and word straight away if the drive is called off.
Not on this page
Free, and not the kind of free that turns into something else.
Every rotation, every invite and every email reminder is free — however many families your church looks after, and however many people you invite. There are no ads on any page, and there never will be.
There’s no donate button pointed at the family either. When people give them money, that is between them and the family: it doesn’t come through here, and nothing is taken out of it.
Care Rotation exists to show the love of Jesus Christ in a practical way: a meal on the table in a hard week. We believe the Bible is God’s Word, that there is one God — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — and that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, who died for our sins and rose again. Care Rotation is our gift to the Church, offered free to reflect that same love.
Built for churches. Sixty days after a rotation ends we delete the family’s address and notes and keep only the record of who helped.
Ask us to set up your church