Ready Set Grow Final Update

By Ruth Smith, Community Engagement Coach

Thank you for a great year as your Community Engagement Coach. We’ve started several new community ministries including Family to Family, the community garden, and regular midweek small groups. 

These programs, as well as my work connecting with community organizations and individuals in our neighborhood, have all contributed to the development of Trinity Fusion, which launches later this month. I am so excited to see this come to fruition.

I wanted to share a few of my highlights from the year:

• Our partnership with Home with Hope. Connecting with the recovery community has been a blessing for me personally. I’ve learned a lot about addiction and loving those in my life who struggle with addiction.
• Reimagining the Caring Fund to be focused on asset-based development, in which individuals requesting assistance from the church are required (when possible) to work alongside our volunteer teams allowing for us to not only meet physical and monetary needs, but also relational ones (which is, after all, at the heart of Trinity’s vision). I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several of the people who have worked with us through the Caring Fund, and these changes have transformed the program...and lives.
• Almost everyone I met with shared the need and desire to connect with a community. I heard time and again how isolated one group or another is, and what better place to connect across divides than at Trinity? That, for me, is a driving force behind Trinity Fusion, the use of story and meal sharing, and encouraging outside groups to utilize our space.
• Working with the volunteers at Trinity. We have so many wonderful, caring people who reach out to others and aren’t afraid to try something new.

Thank you for the blessing this work has been, and your willingness to say, “Yes!”