Adults In Ministry: A Portrait of Impact
If there is anything significant we have learned as an organization in the last 30 years, it is that housing matters! This year Mountain T.O.P. is celebrating an important milestone: Adults In Ministry’s 30th Anniversary. AIM is important to the overall mission of MTOP because of its focus on eliminating substandard housing through Major Home Repair, a program that tackles large-scale, home improvement projects which address the health and safety of homes.
Within its 30 year history, AIM has provided families in Grundy County and surrounding areas with housing resources that are unavailable elsewhere. Trish Holliday, former MTOP Associate Executive Director who created AIM, reflects on the history of the program. “After working with the youth ministry for many years, families were expressing needs that were more complex than youth groups could navigate and so the Major Home Repair program was born. Following Major Home Repair, Summer Plus evolved as a way to provide activities for older youth in the service area.
“With AIM, Mountain T.O.P. became a place where everyone can serve and be served,” says Holliday.
It’s not hard to understand the importance of home. Just ask anyone who doesn’t have a place to lay their head. Major Home Repair and AIM have provided a way for families to complete significant repairs to their home or, in some cases, to replace their home altogether. Over the decades, AIM has relied on various partners, including every participant, for funding. For example MTOP and USDA Rural Development have partnered for more than 20 years to both fund and provide labor on projects, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the area.
Emily Partin, Director of the Family Resource Center at Grundy County Schools shares this: “Because Grundy County has struggled the last three decades with a significant amount of its population living in poverty, we have a new generation of children who are growing up with huge barriers to income mobility. In the school system, we see on a daily basis the impact of what a safe, healthy home does for a child. Thank goodness for Mountain T.O.P. and the ways in which it has served the most vulnerable of our population!”
Many thanks to our three decades of participants and the countless hours they have spent making the love of Jesus Christ come alive through AIM! To learn more about the history of AIM, click here. To learn more about Grundy County’s progress, click here.