The Connecting Grounds is a church that does outreach work to the unsheltered of our community.

Our heart is to find ways to live out the red letters of the gospel in the gaps that exist in our ci

Goal One: To create a trauma-informed faith community that is engaged in meeting the needs of our community through program creation and partnership development.

Goal Two: To advocate for issues of justice that are connected to poverty, homelessness, foster care, bigotry, and racism.

Goal Three: To build transitional, supportive housing in our community to help reduce the number of people living on the streets without shelter and resources.

Two of our staff have returned to work on master's and doctorate degrees to further develop their skills, knowledge, and advocacy. We also do regular staff meetings and trainings on policy issues, social justice, and teamwork.

In the last year, we have adapted in many ways to changes in our community, our organization, and the world. We do street outreach with our unsheltered population every night that it is colder than 40 degrees. Last winter, the demand was high and volunteers would often be out until well after midnight each night which made it hard for people to connect at times. This year, we divided the city into four routes. We would do two routes a night and give out more supplies per stop than last year. However, this allowed us to visit fewer places per night but to spend more time talking to people in need to help connect them to resources. This also led to higher volunteer engagement because our routes were finished by 10 PM each night. We also saw a high need for respite care for unhoused people in our community with many people who were sick with COVID or other illnesses having nowhere to recover, we purchased a small house and converted it into a respite house where we can care for three people at a time that is recovering from injury and illness. We also saw a need to make medical care, in general, more accessible to our unsheltered population so we wrote a grant to offer virtual and telehealth medicine through street outreach and our outreach center. During the Omnicron variant spike of COVID in our area, we had to close our outreach center to foot traffic to protect the health of our guests and volunteers. Instead of simply not offering services during this time, we created an outdoor aid station on our sidewalk that we could stock with survival supplies and food 24 hours a day so that people could come and get what they needed. We also used this time to remodel the inside of our center to expand our medical care clinic, offer mailboxes, create a barbershop for haircuts, expand our clothing closet, and create case management space for us to meet with people and help connect them to resources. Now that we are back open the improvement in our services is great!