Looking back on 10 years!

Perhaps you have noticed that LHCC just celebrated our ten-year anniversary this past month, culminating in a Kinship Kitchen lunch that coincided with our annual Summer Camp. It was a blast! God has so blessed our ministry this past decade.

We hosted 40 special guests, consisting of church pastors and church staff, loyal donors, and volunteers. We viewed a video from our early beginnings at Sun Valley Apartments, from 2012. I was reminded again how we have evolved as a ministry. We focused initially on kids residing in crowded low-income apartment complexes, without any consideration for engaging their parents, to a holistic ministry that would now be missing a vital component without the engagement and relationships that we have established with parents. I have also evolved over 10 years, having gained valuable mission field experience along the way, including how to stick with our mission and not enable people, grow too quickly, and lose what we have gained from relationships.

In this first of three ten-year anniversary updates, I focus on a summary of our early beginnings. The second instalment will concentrate on what we have learned. The final anniversary blogpost will focus on what we believe the Lord has in store for us, as we look forward.

Two days after I quit my corporate job uptown the South Blvd apartment complex experienced a fire, displacing 21 families from 10 apartment units. That was my first lesson as a finance guy. Families are packed into small apartments just to be able to survive and share the costs of expensive rents. I had so much to learn and felt like God had me in the right place helping with ground zero triage and finding new homes for most of the displaced families. I have also personally encountered joy and high tops but also spiritual warfare, having been wrongly accused of inappropriate behavior with children, in front of 50 kids, on two occasions, by undesirables looking to take me down. Now we ensure parents are validated and have our backs. And of course God has us in His care as well …

 Fast forward ten years, and LHCC has been blessed to see over 550 families come through our doors. Many families stay with LHCC for a season, because they are constantly moving families further afield to better housing outside of the clamped apartments. Fortunately, the large majority stay for many years, as LHCC aims to develop trust and strong bonds with parents, and children, as we address needs and upward mobility in the form of education and workforce development. Even after they move out of the local apartments, they keep coming back and we are so delighted to be serving middle and high school students when they arrived here to start their school careers.

 We have evolved from serving apartment-based families after the apartment fire, to helping tutor kids and organizing soccer socials on weekends, to moving to the church as our facility of choice. Then we engaged the parents when we made a fundamental shift in expecting them to bring their children to the programs, rather than expect that LHCC with do what they could reasonably do for themselves.

 Parents were served through English Language Learning (ELL) and other interventions while their kids were being helping by volunteers with homework and reading.

 We’ll be back in two weeks with what LHCC has learned in ten years

 Until next time,

I am,

Brent Morris

August 1, 2022