MIFA (Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association)

Note: The organization did not respond to this question.

Note: The organization did not respond to this question.

This year we expanded our leadership team—now called the TRAC Team (Trust, Results, Accountability, and Commitment)—which brought more perspectives and more talent to the table for our discussions about strategy. This team is responsible for executing our current strategic plan (outlined in the goals above) and for carrying out our continuous improvement process through monthly reviews of the program and administrative dashboard to track progress toward annual goals. This expanded team has resulted in a stronger and more democratic strategic plan and richer discussion about MIFA's goals and projects.

MIFA was created from collaboration in 1968, and these partnerships and cooperative efforts within our community are still central to our work. We work with a number of area agencies to avoid duplication of services and to ensure that our clients have the best resources available to meet their needs. We work closely with Community Alliance for the Homeless for our homelessness prevention programs; we are active members of the Safety Net Collaborative; we partner with Aging Commission of the Mid-South to provide meals to seniors; we have been in partnership with MLGW since 1982 to administer the Plus-1 program; the City of Memphis regularly refers clients to us for assistance; and our emergency assistance programs work within an extensive network of community resources to provide referrals. Our advocacy efforts focus on three key areas: senior hunger, family homelessness, and interfaith relations.

We have learned that in order to be impactful, we have to be strategic and innovative in our response to the changing needs of our community. Our greatest successes this year aligned with the focus areas of our current strategic plan: enhancing Meals on Wheels through innovation and technology, exploring solutions to intervene and stabilize homeless families with children, and empowering our staff to foster accountability and drive impact. MIFA Meals on Wheels has been able to reach more seniors thanks to increased federal grants through our funder and partner, the Aging Commission of the Mid-South. Our program is growing at a rate of about 100 clients each month, and our team continues to scale up operations to serve more. That growth means more staff drivers, more meals, more vehicles—and it has also increased the workload for our meal delivery volunteers, whose dedication to our seniors remains at the core of our work. As a shortage of affordable rental housing (an estimated deficit of ~36,000 affordable and available homes for low-income renters) threatens more families in our community, our Family Programs team has focused on building relationships with landlords and community partners through a series of roundtable discussions. These opportunities for education and partnership have strengthened our connections in the community to facilitate rental placements for our families. In an effort to raise community awareness of these issues, we hosted Stephanie Land, author of Maid (now an acclaimed Netflix series) for a successful fundraising event which attracted 500 attendees in September 2022. Our advocacy opportunities in 2021-22 included President and CEO Sally Jones Heinz's testimony to the House Rules Committee about senior food insecurity and the impact of Meals on Wheels; and local opportunities to advocate for Meals on Wheels before the Shelby County Delegation and the Tennessee Federation on Aging Conference.