MEND (Meet Each Need with Dignity) donates hundreds of pounds of food to us weekly from their Pacoima foodbank.

They were founded in the early 1970's in an effort to transform the lives of the neediest residents of the San Fernando Valley - poor children and their struggling families. Starting as a small group of volunteers working from a garage, MEND has grown primarily by word-of-mouth into one of the leanest operating non-profit organizations in existence. More than 91% of the support and donations received by MEND, now the largest poverty agency in the Valley, provides emergency food, clothing, medical, vision and dental care, job skills training and job placement assistance, English as a Second Language classes, youth activities, and a Christmas program. In 2009, we served as many as 31,000 individuals per month.

People Helping People Each month, more than 9,300 hours are donated by volunteers from a broad range of backgrounds and income levels; all joining together to act as people helping people. Each person plays a vital role in meeting the mission of MEND. From the distribution of food, clothing to assistance in job training and placement, our volunteers give MEND life.

Visit MEND at mendpoverty.org.

Hello Skid Row Team!For those of you who don't know me, my name is Sam Lundquist. I met some of you two Friday nights ago at a Skid Row Prayer Meeting, and as often as I can, I try to make it out to serve on Sunday mornings. It was such a pleasure getting to be with you on Friday and tell you about The Hope Chronicles. I've already talked with some of you about joining me on this journey, and I can't wait to have you join.

A quick plug—please follow the project online at  Twitter , Facebook , and Vimeo. :-)

For those of you who weren't there, I've been asked to do a quick little recap of what The Hope Chronicles is, and tell you more this exciting new project that I'm working on. Very simply, we are a group of people going out into our world and asking the people around us one question: "What is your hope?" You can read our full mission statement here.

Why are we doing this? To get to know our neighbors. To understand the deepest heart of our community. To allow ourselves to be changed through conversation. To discover new, better ways of helping our neighborhood. To share these stories and invite others to join us on this adventure.

We call ourselves Community Listeners. People who are distinctly, honestly, and humbly curious about the people around us, and willing to open ourselves up to changing through conversation. In other words, we are the ears to hear the stories of our community, and we are the voices to share those stories with the world and tell others how we've been changed.

We are collecting these "hopes" and conversations a few different ways. Primarily through video with tiny, pocket cameras and cell phones, but also through audio recordings (iPhones/digital recorders), and written down in journals. We share these hopes online at our website (you can view some at www.thehopechronicles.org) to enlighten, inform, and inspire—but most of all to invite others to join us on this adventure and start asking their community about it's hopes.

With that, I would like to invite you all to join us as Community Listeners as you serve on Skid Row. I can think of nothing more exciting than understanding the deepest hearts of the people you serve everyday, learning from their stories, sharing those stories, and then discovering some new, better ways to help them. I would love to collaborate in any way possible, but here are some initial ideas I had:

1) Capturing Conversations. This is as simple as walking around Skid Row with a little pocket camera/audio recorder and inviting people to share their hopes with you. This gives someone who typically has no voice an important chance to share their very personal hopes for themselves, their family, the neighborhood. You can watch/hear some of these conversations here.

2) Passing Out Journals. For people who would rather share their thoughts in writing, we have Hope Journals. These simple books are an open space for anyone to write down their personal thoughts. You can read some of the hopes we've collected in journals here.

If you are interested in participating, please get in touch with me and we can talk through details. Feel free to call or email me with any questions, comments, etc. I'm so excited about collaborating with this ministry. The work you all do is so amazing, and I would love to be here to share those stories with others.

Sam Lundquist
Founder & Community Listener | sam@thehopechronicles.org
The Hope Chronicles
thehopechronicles.org  | 323.963.3752  

The Jonah Project is a non-profit, non-denominational Christian organization dedicated to helping the homeless community on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Reaching out to the poor and brokenhearted was an important part of Jesus’ ministry, and certainly is still a vital part of the ministry of the Body of Christ today.
I
In fact, in the first sermon Jesus preached (Luke 4:18); and also again when John the Baptist sent his disciples to inquire as to whether Jesus was the Messiah
(Matt 11:4-5, Luke 7:22), Jesus quoted these verses from Isaiah –

“ The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed;  (Luke 4:18)

This is exactly what we feel God has called us to do on the streets of Skid Row – preach the gospel to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, setting at liberty those who are oppressed. In doing so, we also hope to encourage the rest of the Body of Christ to join us in this important and often forgotten or overlooked ministry of Jesus. It is our desire that the Body of Christ will join together to support us in this ministry,through prayer, financial support and by physically joining us on the streets to minister to lost and dying souls by shining the light of Jesus in this dark and dismal place.

Visit the Jonah Project at jonahproject.org.

The Forest Movement is a non-profit organization composed of people who want to change the world, and know they can do it. We wish to close the gap between the rich and the poor by focusing on revealing and therefor eliminating money-based prejudice. We use a hypothetical forest as an example of what we wish to attain, a perfect symbiotic community of people, standing together as one.  

Visit the Forest Movement at: http://www.the-forest-movement.webs.com/