This is ‘Clapp Your Hands’ kind of blog.
This week, the bumper sticker I imagine, would read, Save our homeless families and children, United Community Ministries. Not polished, not clever, but direct.
In the wake of the recent audit, as Rocky Mount looks at budgets and reductions, one consequence is significant. Nearly three hundred thousand dollars, 48% of the operating budget for United Community Ministries, is gone.
That loss makes you worry. What would happen to the families and children UCM serves should the doors close?
But the good people who run UCM, especially Linda Brunson, Executive Director, are not the kind of people to throw up their hands and run off into the night.
The loss of funding is not abstract. It affects beds, and meals, and the simple dignity of a door that opens when there is nowhere else to go. We need to understand what is at risk.
For forty eight years, United Community Ministries has served in Rocky Mount, not as an idea, but as a presence. A place where the door opens. Where a name is asked. Where a night indoors can be found when there was nowhere else to go
It began its life at the Church of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, and grew into something larger, a collaboration of faith leaders, agencies, and citizens who believed that the measure of a community is found in how it meets its most difficult realities.
And homelessness is one of those realities.
We do not always fully see the homeless. It exsists at the edges of our daily routines, along streets we pass by, behind circumstances we do not understand.
But for decades, United Community Ministries has provided not only shelter, but transition. Not only food, but a measure of stability. Not only assistance, but dignity.
They operate the only emergency and transitional shelter for the general homeless population across Nash and Edgecombe Counties.
Without them, there is not another door to knock on.
This blog asks a question. What comes next?
What happens to a city if a place like this is no longer there? What happens when the work that has been carried, day after day, year after year, suddenly disappears?
Main Street teaches us to notice what endures. The buildings that remain, the storefronts that continue to serve, the institutions that hold their place across generations.
United Community Ministries is not a facade, but it is part of that same fabric.
It is one of the ways a city keeps faith with itself.
If it were to close, the absence would not arrive all at once. It would come gradually, in longer nights, in fewer options, in people who have nowhere to go.
And perhaps that is the truest measure of its value.
Not only in what it does when it is open, but in what would be felt if it were gone.
Thank goodness, a response is forming after the news of the budget loss. Funds are being raised. Interest from prospective new board members have come forward, which would guarantee new energy and enthusiasm, and more hearts to serve,
This response is good news. So many lives have been touched by UCM. There are generous hands in this community, and they have recognized what is at stake here.
For those who want to understand more about the work of United Community Ministries, to see it for themselves, or to consider how they might contribute to this ministry , don’t hesitate to use the contact information below.
Consider this a flag, raised in respect, in thanksgiving, and in hope, for the work of UCM, and for the families and children who pass through its doors.
Contact Information
P.O. Box 2624
Rocky Mount, NC 27802
Main Street Rocky Mount 