Detroit's City Mission is Worthy of Suburbanites' Attention

We’ve had some awesome opportunities to help out with food distribution programs around Canton, Westland, and other locations.  But we wanted to tell you about a place we recently helped at – City Mission in Detroit.

What is City Mission?

City Mission is located in the Brightmoor community of Detroit.  The building itself is on Schoolcraft, west of Evergreen.  Not a great area of town, and one that the folks at City Mission are working hard to make changes to.  Their website tells us some really scary stuff about the kids in the area – 75% of children are living in poverty, 78% of children drop out of high school, and the average student is 18 months behind grade level.  The kids are often from fatherless homes, live on social assistance, and live with crime all around them.

So, we had the opportunity to go out there and help out with filling food baskets and delivering them right to the families for whom they are intended.  Lee and Noel Bittinger were there (Lee is second from the left with the red collar and Noel is on the right with the white shirt and hat).  Also there were Dottie Stults, our Leads Manager here at The Bittinger Team, and her young daughter.  It was so cool to see young kids there helping out in whatever way their little hands could.

Not Just About Boxing It Up

And what else was cool about this work?  We got to deliver the food to the people who were actually getting it.  Our past experiences had us packing up the food and never seeing who got it in the end.  This time, we faced the full pallets, sorted the food into smaller containers, and then take it right to the families.

Here you truly get to see the results of your hard work. It takes quite a bit out of you to see the devastation some of these families are experiencing. All of them are grateful but some of them show it in very outspoken ways. You get hugs, smiles, tears of joy. Sometime you can see they are a bit ashamed. When we sense that, we just go over and give them a heartfelt hug for quite a while and then can feel them just loosening up in our arms.

Meeting Anthony

This particular weekend we visited a man named Anthony. He asked us to pray for him because he is an alcoholic and can’t keep a job. His wife appears to work but you can tell from the looks of things they were struggling. All four of us came into the house and spoke with Anthony for a while. We joined hands and prayed for Anthony find a way to solve his problem.

He is a veteran so we followed up afterwards at a meeting we were at with Beth Marshall who is involved with veterans and the insurance benefits so many of them don’t know they have coming to them. Beth said she would follow up and see if she can get Anthony in touch with the AMVET hotline to see if he can get help he does not even know may exist.

It’s a long shot but if we can get help for Anthony, just imagine what effect it will have on his life and that of his family.

City Mission Needs Help

City Mission offers mentoring and tutoring in addition to an academy and additional support programs.  They are in desperate need of financial support as well as volunteers.  We’d be happy to talk to you about what we saw there and you can contact us by clicking here.  Or, you can contact City Mission by clicking here.  They can use the help so that they can carry on with their work and give these folks some hope for the future.