Since Mother’s Day is this month, we wanted to center our mission around giving hope and love to Mother’s and children in our community without a home to call their own.  So, on Saturday  May 16, twenty- five people selflessly came out to Faith Community Outreach, a women and children’s homeless shelter.

Due to critical community needs, Faith Community Outreach opened a homeless shelter for women and children in 1997. Their vision is to offer low income and homeless people a way to obtain the skills and resources necessary to become self sufficient and productive. Faith Community Outreach is currently housing women with children ranging from 4 to 15 years old.

With generous monetary and material donations we were able to purchase materials to build a raised bed vegetable garden.  The women at the shelter helped plant tomatoes, squash, okra and cucumbers and learned how to care for the garden.  We also took six plain (non-painted) picnic tables, which the shelter uses to feed the homeless during the week, and brought them to life.  Lime green, bright orange, teal blue, yellow, hot pink and purple tables can’t help but bring a smile to your face while sitting and eating at them.  Other task outside included pressure washing the front of the house, porch, and walkway, removing debris from the roof and gutters, painting a new bookshelf for the children’s play room, mowing the lawn, pulling vines off the house, laying new pine straw in the beds and adding two new urns with ferns to the front porch.  While all of this was going on outside, other volunteers spent time inside with the children doing arts and crafts, painting murals in the children’s play room, recovering a couch and just spending time getting to know the Mothers staying here.

During the few weeks leading up to this mission, volunteers filled over six boxes with books, dvds, videos, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, soap, paper products, etc…  for this shelter. Amazing!!!

In just four short hours this mission not only changed the physical appearance of Faith Community Outreach, but also the lives of those of us helping our new friends on this beautiful day.  Hope to see you next month for our Monthly Mission: June.

If you participated in this mission and would like to add your thoughts and feelings or send over pictures from this mission, please write us and we’ll add it to this blog. Thanks.

To see more pics from this mission visit our photo gallery.

With big gulp coffee cups in hand and sleep still in their eyes, one couldn't help but wonder if it was a bit of an early start for many of the volunteers that Saturday morning. Yet rather than sleep in on April 25^th, 2009, eighteen people selflessly came out in the early morning hours to support Mission:Change's first Monthly Mission – a partnership with the local chapter of Rebuilding Together. Rebuilding Together – a national nonprofit organization that, among other things, works to repair to safe living standards the houses of low-income elderly and disabled people – was hosting their signature annual event that Saturday, National Rebuilding Day. Mission:Change had been assigned to the house of Miss Minnie, an elderly Albany resident raising her two young granddaughters.

The outside of Miss Minnie's house, though in need of a good pressure washing, didn't hint at the amount of work needed on the inside to bring it up to Rebuilding Together's “warm, safe and dry” standards. Interior doors needed new hardware, leveled and rehung while exterior doors needed replaced entirely; the kitchen needed a thorough scrubbing before the cabinets could be sanded and repainted; bedrooms were in desperate need of fresh paint, while a water leak behind the washing machine had eaten away a sizable hole in one bedroom wall. Outside, the house needed pressure washed, the lawn mowed and a few large tree branches needed taken down. It was obvious that Miss Minnie felt bad that her house was in such a state, but there was little she could have done what with her limited mobility and income.

Once we sent Miss Minnie off for her first ever pedicure, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work sprucing up the house of this well-deserving grandmother. For a while there it seemed that for every problem we fixed, two new problems would come to our attention. It was certainly shaping up to be a longer day than most of us expected. But when Miss Minnie came home, excited to show us her pretty red toenails and tell us about the relaxing foot bath, we were instantly rejuvenated for the home stretch.

After eleven hours and quite a lot of measuring, cutting, sawing, scrubbing, sanding, painting, head scratching, patching, and cleaning (not to mention demolishing a couple dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and a few pizzas), we were able to successfully cross off the last few items from our to-do list and pack up our tools. Miss Minnie thanked us all so much for our love and support, and we drove away with a new appreciation of an old adage: What a difference a day makes.

Many thanks to Liberty Baptist for donating lunch, and to all of the dedicated volunteers who made our first Monthly Mission such a success. You can check out more images from April's Mission in our Photo Gallery.