Community Starts at the Table
About Pancakes & Love
What Pancakes & Love is
Pancakes & Love is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization built around one simple idea: bringing people together and making sure nobody has to face life alone. It begins with neighborhood pancake gatherings, but the pancakes are only the doorway.
Mission
Pancakes & Love exists to bring communities together, create meaningful human connections, and provide practical support to individuals and families facing difficult seasons of life. Through community meals, volunteer service, assistance programs, partnerships and the Pay It Forward model, we work to remind people that they are part of a community that cares.
Vision
A network of Pancakes & Love chapters in communities throughout Utah and eventually beyond — each one bringing people together around a table, then turning those relationships into meaningful community service.
Everyone is welcome
- People don't have to prove they are struggling to sit at the table.
- They don't have to donate.
- They don't have to volunteer.
- They don't have to tell their story.
- They are simply welcome.
The promise behind everything we do
We don't promise to fix people's lives. We promise that no one has to take the next step alone.
The goal
It isn't simply to serve pancakes
Neighbors know one another
Streets where people recognize each other's names, not just each other's cars.
Seniors aren't forgotten
Older neighbors stay part of the community instead of disappearing from it.
Veterans know someone has their back
Support that shows up long after the thank-you-for-your-service handshake.
Families can ask without humiliation
Requesting help should never cost someone their dignity.
Connection for the hardest seasons
Addiction, PTSD, depression, grief and loneliness are less heavy shared.
Volunteers have meaningful work
Real projects for real neighbors, not busywork.
Young people learn to serve
Students who help someone instead of checking a box.
Businesses support their own community
Local companies investing directly where they operate.
Helped today, helping tomorrow
The people who receive help often become the people giving it.
What makes us different
We're the connection between all of it
Pancakes & Love isn't just a pancake breakfast, a food charity, a volunteer organization, a mental-health organization, a veterans organization, a senior program, a family-assistance program or a community-service organization. It's the connection between all of them, and the table is where that connection begins.
Someone sitting at breakfast may own a landscaping company. Across the table may be an elderly woman whose yard has become unmanageable.
Someone else may be a veteran struggling with PTSD. Another person may be a counselor. Someone may own a trucking company. Someone may desperately need help moving.
Pancakes & Love brings those people together.
About the Founder
James “Buck” Mays
Founder & Executive Director, Pancakes & Love
Pancakes & Love didn't begin as a business idea for Buck Mays. It began with a simple belief: people need people.
After years of working hard, building a career, raising a family, and experiencing the ups and downs that come with life, Buck began looking at his community differently. He saw people struggling with things that aren't always visible — loneliness, grief, addiction, depression, PTSD, financial hardship, family challenges, and simply trying to make it through another difficult day.
He also saw something else: communities full of good people who wanted to help but often didn't know where to begin.
That became the heart behind Pancakes & Love.
Pancakes aren't the mission — they're the invitation
Buck believes some of the biggest changes in a community can begin with something as simple as sitting down together for breakfast. The table gives strangers an opportunity to become neighbors, neighbors an opportunity to become friends, and friends an opportunity to begin looking out for one another.
But for Buck, bringing people together isn't enough. Pancakes & Love is about taking that connection beyond the table and putting love into action.
That means showing up when someone's yard has become too much for them to handle. Helping a senior who doesn't have anyone nearby. Providing a trailer, equipment, volunteers, or a few hours of hard work when a family is overwhelmed. Helping someone move. Providing a meal. Supporting veterans and their families. Helping families during the holidays. And sometimes simply sitting beside someone who needs to know they aren't alone.
Built from the ground up
Buck has invested his own time, money, equipment, and countless hours into building Pancakes & Love from the ground up. From purchasing grills and equipment and hauling trailers to organizing community breakfasts, building partnerships, recruiting volunteers, developing programs, pursuing grants, and personally showing up for service projects, he believes leadership begins by being willing to do the work yourself.
The long-term vision
Buck's vision is much larger than a pancake breakfast. He wants Pancakes & Love to become a community where asking for help doesn't bring embarrassment and offering help doesn't require recognition.
The Pay It Forward philosophy is central to that vision. Someone may receive help today and be unable to give anything back. That's okay. Maybe tomorrow, next month, or years from now, they'll have an opportunity to help somebody else.
That's how the circle continues.
Buck's long-term vision is to establish Pancakes & Love chapters in other communities while protecting the simple principle on which the organization was founded:
Everyone deserves a seat at the table.
Pancakes & Love isn't about promising to solve every problem someone faces. It's about making sure they don't have to face the next step by themselves.
Buck's Promise
“We don't promise to fix people's lives. We promise that no one has to take the next step alone.”
For Buck, that's more than the motto of Pancakes & Love. It's the reason it exists.
Buck, right where you'll find him — at the griddle.