our mission in the city experience 2025

MITC adopted 3 refugee families this year. We partnered with Creativity Camp to collect donations of clothing and household items as well as arts & craft to make Creativity Kits. After sorting and organizing the donations for the families, we had a presentation from  Catholic Charities  about the refugee resettlement process. They explained the current challenges that refugees face given the cuts in funding and that many families are no longer able to bring over relatives that face danger in their country of origin. We learned about our refugee families, one from Afghanistan and one from Burma as well as an additional family that we adopted after we learned that the family had been robbed and lost almost everything. 

We loaded up the truck and Suburban full of items and headed to Clarkston, the most diverse square mile in the country. The family had nothing to sit on other than plastic folding chairs and no beds. We set up the furniture, put down rugs and added lamps. We did puzzles and played games outdoors with the children. They were so grateful for all the items that we brought, and particularly liked the soccer balls and sidewalk chalk. We only had time to complete one delivery but we organized the other items for the additional two families to be delivered later.

Today we headed to Nicholas House, a shelter helping families that are experiencing homelessness. We had an incredible guest speaker, Rep. Phil Olaleye, who has sponsored legislation on affordable housing. He shared with us some of the dynamics going on in Atlanta and the challenge of balancing development and improvement of neighborhoods with maintaining affordable housing. We then did a budgeting exercise with Justin Floyd of Nicholas House which was a powerful way to illustrate the tough choices that families have to make on how to allocate limited resources. It is heartbreaking how one unexpected expense or loss of income can cause a family to be homeless. We also learned about the difficulty in finding new housing and the costs associated with getting back into a new place. We provided lunch for the residents and did a service project with the children to create stepping stones for their outdoor space. 

We began our day at CHaRM, the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials where we took a tour and then worked on site. It is incredible the scope of items CHaRM recycles including styrafoam, cooking oil, old books, all types of plastics, paint, musical instruments and more! We were proud to learn that Georgia is #2 in the country for utilizing recycled materials in manufacturing and want to continue to support this circular economy!

Following CHaRM, we headed to Re:Loom, a favorite partner of MITC. re:Loom is an affordable housing initiative that uses employs low income people, including refugees, to make products from recycled textiles. In addition to work, Re:Loom provides benefits and life skills training for their future, including how to use insurance, what PTO time is and how to schedule it, how to set up a bank account, how to use public transportation and more.    Re:Loom now focuses on corporate partnerships where companies like UPS take their old uniforms to be recycled and Re:Loom makes a new product that UPS buys back from them.  Re:Loom is now also working with Universities as well! 

 Re:Loom’s products are really cool!  You can check them out here Re:Loom Shop.  

Today we revisited Homelessness and Affordable Housing and learned about food deserts and food insecurity.  We discussed how we really should call it food apartheid as opposed to food deserts as deserts are naturally occurring and food deserts are a result of manmade development.  

We began our day by making snack bags for City of Refuge and then headed down for our tour of their incredible facility located in 30314, an area that was known as the “Bluff” due to its drugs and crime. City of Refuge is an incredible organization helping individuals and families transition out of crisis. It provides holistic solutions including health & wellness, housing, job training, youth development and education. 

Mission in the City partnered with NCL, YMSL and local neighbors for a food drive for Claudia’s House, the food pantry at Grove Park, and hosted a sandwich making event at PAWKids. We delivered over 2,100 items of food and made 472 sandwiches valued at over $10,000!

While it is hard to quantify all of the impact from this week, here is a snapshot:

• 623 Hours 
• 86 snack bags
• 2,100+ pantry items
• 472 sandwiches
• 262 items of clothing, shoes and accessories for refugee families
• Dozens of arts and crafts, games and soccer balls
• Desks, dressers, rugs and bedding for refugee apartments
• Too many recycling items to count…
• Lots of new ideas for ways we can impact our community to make a difference!

We began our day with a presentation from Grace, a refugee case manager, who spoke to us about the refugee resettlement process. She explained that refugees are people that have to leave their country and cannot return because of religious persecution, political unrest or other instability threatening their lives.  Refugees are the most vetted of anyone coming into our country and the process takes many years.  The average stay of a refugee in a camp is 17 years!  Grace shared with us that it took 6 years for the family that we adopted to get to the United States.  Once a refugee gets here, the case worker helps them find housing, gets the children enrolled in school, teaches them how to use public transportation and connects them to a bunch of other resources.  The caseworker stays with the family for 90 days after they arrive.  We talked about the community of Clarkston where many refugees resettle.  It is referred to as the most diverse square mile in the world.

After Grace explained the process, she shared with us some information about the refugee family that we adopted.  The family is from Afghanistan and had to flee due to the unstable situation there.  They do not ask them the details of why they left as it usually involves a lot of trauma for the family.  We do know that it took 6 years for the family to get to the United States.  The mother, Sajeda, is an artist and they have one child, Sama, age 7.  We partnered with Creativity Camp to provide clothing donations for Sama and we received more than 100 pieces of clothing - dresses, pants, shorts, tops, shoes, pajamas and more.  They also sent headbands and purses and dress up clothes.  Mission in the City purchased new socks and underwear for the entire family as well as arts and crafts and school supplies for Sams.  Mission in the City also donated a dresser and club chair for their apartment.

After loading up the truck, we headed to Lithonia where the family had just moved into its apartment complex.  They were so grateful for all the items that we brought, and Sams was overjoyed with her clothes and art supplies.  Her favorite was a unicorn costume and screamed with excitement to finally have pajamas like other kids have.  Her English was pretty good and she said she learned English with YouTube!

We were hoping to tour Clarkston as well this day and to do some additional research on Lithonia for our refugee family, but it wound up being a very full day.  Attached is the infographic on refugees we shared. 

MITC partnered with Creativity Camp to make snack bags and then we headed downtown to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.  As we drove to the Shrine, we could see lines of homeless people forming waiting for a hot cup of coffee and food.  More than 10,000 individuals in Georgia are homeless on a typical night.

The Shrine has several different ministries to serve the homeless.  Saint Francis Table is a soup kitchen that operates on Saturday mornings and provides a warm meal along with the opportunity to get bread, pastries and other items.  They also have a Marketplace that is a food pantry serving downtown and a Sandwich/Snack bag ministry where we volunteered.  As we had time before we started distributing sandwiches and snack bags, we took a tour of the Marketplace and learned the system that it uses to allow people to come “shop” for food.  Some interesting facts - oil is a hot commodity as many low income people cannot afford it and so they are not able to cook or make things on their own.  After our tour of the Marketplace, we prepped snack bags and then headed to the area that they serve from.  When the doors opened it was very chaotic, but the kids jumped right in and created an assembly line giving out sandwiches, snack bags, pouring coffee, handing out water bottles and running snack bags and sandwiches to handicap persons who could not come down the stairs.  I think one of the most impactful parts of this was seeing the many faces of the homeless.  We never know anyone’s story and there are so many causes of homelessness.  After we served for 1 1/2 hours, we took the donations from the church and helped restock the Marketplace shelves.  As we got in the car, I went to get our snacks and we realized that we had donated them along with the snack bags!  We all decided that they needed the snacks more than us.

We left downtown and headed back to Grove Park to meet with Grove Park Renewal to learn about affordable housing.    Mr. Johnston is a resident of Grove Park and talked to us about living in the community and the lack of resources there.  We had already learned about Grove Park being a food desert so it was great to tie the days together.  It was hard to cover all of the issues in an hour, but we were able to introduce the complexity of urban development to help a neighborhood with increasing rents that push out poor people. 

Today we learned about food deserts and food insecurity.  Mission in the City hosted a food drive for Claudia’s House, the food pantry at Grove Park and collected over 780 items.  We loaded up 3 cars full of food to take with us down to Grove Park.   

In addition, in honor of Juneteenth, Mission in the City coordinated a larger community service project to make over 535 sandwiches for the community. 

After we finished sandwich making, we stayed and worked in the pantry of Claudia’s house to reorganize and shelve the items that we brought.  It was a long day, but A LOT of impact!

We began our day at Re:Loom, which is part of the Affordable Housing Initiative.  It hires people in unstable economic situations and provides them a job with benefits as well as life skills training for their future. Re:Loom provides both a salary and benefits and teaches its employees how to use insurance, what PTO time is and how to schedule it, how to set up a bank account, how to use public transportation and more.  Re:Loom has hired homeless people, immigrants and refugees and taught them to weave on their looms to make all sorts of beautiful products to sell.  We toured the warehouse and production center with Tammy, the head of operations.

Tammy shared some stories of the people they hired.  One of its first employees was a homeless man who needed a job and stability quickly as he had to take sole custody of a baby.  He had no life skills and had not held a job. Re:Loom taught him how to hold a job, make a budget, grocery shop and more.  He was showing up late for work every day, but that was because he was taking public transportation that took him over 2 1/2 hours to get to work.  Tammy helped him find affordable housing closer to work and a better route on public transportation.  He told Tammy that he thought she was really hard on him, but  later realized she was just preparing for the real world! He is now thriving in LA!  Re:Loom also hires many immigrants and refugees.  Currently, they have a large number of women from Afghanistan due to the crisis in that country, but they have previously had refugees from Nepal and other countries.

While it is hard to quantify all of the impact from this week, here is a snapshot:

• 456 hours
• 783 food items for the food pantry
• 535 sandwiches made
• 67 Snack bags
• 128 items of clothing, shoes and accessories for our refugee family
• 36 art supplies, plus a new complete art set 
• Furniture and bedding for refugee apartment
• Too many pieces of trash to count pulled from the Chattahoochee  River at Whitewater Park
• Lots of new ideas for ways we can impact our community to make a difference!