Community First! Village offers homeless shelter, community, health services

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Summary

• Community First! Village demonstrates the power of combining shelter for homeless men and women with neighborhoods, social interaction, opportunities to earn a dignified income, healthy food, public transportation, and, through provider partnerships, essential physical and mental health services.
• Vision, community connections, commitment to helping less fortunate people, and perseverance are keys to establishing and growing a nonprofit devoted to solving homelessness.
• Working with homeless people has had transformative effects on Alan Graham and thousands of volunteers at Mobile Loaves & Fishes and Community First! Village.

iStock.com/Drazen Zigic

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What started in a minivan with six men serving peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to those living on the street has grown into a food truck ministry serving more than 7,000,000 meals and providing clothing and other life-sustaining items to homeless men and women seven nights a week, 365 days a year! It has since expanded into a village providing housing and a supportive community for hundreds of formerly homeless men and women. It’s all the result of a vision Alan Graham had after coffee with his wife and a mutual friend.

Mobile Loaves & Fishes MLF is a nonprofit organization formed in 1998, and the founder and CEO of MLF.  I had an opportunity in February of this year to talk with Alan about MLF and its transformative residential program, Community First! Village.to serve the needs of homeless men and women in Austin, Texas. Alan Graham is the founder and CEO of MLF. I had an opportunity in February of this year to talk with Alan about MLF and its transformative residential program, Community First! Village.

Alan is a lifelong resident of Austin, attended the University of Texas-Austin, and entered the real estate business after graduating in 1978..  He later founded a successful real estate development company that developed airport cargo facilities in Austin and elsewhere in the United States. Alan’s experience in the real estate business would prove to be invaluable to MLF and the development of Community First! Village.

I was curious about what led Alan to help homeless people. It started in 1996, according to Alan, when he attended a spiritual retreat that left him searching for the answer to this question: “What is it that God wants me to do?” Alan explained that “one night, while enjoying a cup of coffee with my wife and a mutual friend, I heard about a ministry in Corpus Christi, Texas, where on cold winter nights, multiple churches would gather together, pool their resources of food and clothing, and share them with men and women living on the streets of Corpus Christi during the winter months.” Alan told me that an image of a vehicle distributing food to the homeless in Austin instantly appeared in his mind, and he could not shake it. This image and the story of the Corpus Christi ministry were catalytic events in the formation of MLF.

Alan told me that he recruited four of his church friends to plan how they might implement his idea. Then, according to Alan, “on September 13, 1998, [we] went out in the back of a buddy's green minivan and served 75 sack meals to the men and women that lived on the streets of Austin, and [we] were hooked—hook, line, and sinker at that point.”

I asked Alan how he and his friends located homeless people to serve.  Alan explained: “Well, providentially, at my church, St. John Neumann Catholic Church, we recently had hired a gentleman named Houston Flake onto the custodial staff who had spent most of his adult life homeless, and … he was our eyes and ears to the streets.”

After completing a number of service trips with the minivan, Alan and his friends turned their attention to a larger delivery truck—a food truck—to implement their mission. Alan told me that in either very late 1998 or early 1999, they purchased the delivery truck and had to outfit it with a catering bed, and then, by April of 1999, the food truck had its first scheduled deliveries. “[W]e were kind of the first food truck thing going on in Austin, Texas,” Alan said, smiling. “We think we inspired all the food truck operations that you see around the country now, who knows?”

From its humble beginnings, the Truck Ministry has grown substantially. Today, it is operated almost entirely by volunteers. The Truck Ministry, in collaboration with community partnerships, has served over 6,540,000 meals  in central Texas.

One of MLF’s unique and impactful ministries is Community First! Village.  I asked Alan to explain what it is and what led MLF to develop it. “Community First! Village is a master planned neighborhood designed to encourage community that is located on approximately 180 acres in Travis County, Texas, adjacent to the City of Austin,” Alan said. “Community First! provides affordable, permanent housing to chronically homeless men and women. It is currently home to about 500 residents, but expansion to include 1,400 additional housing units is underway.”

As for what led MLF to develop it, Alan stated that the homeless men and women MLF was serving needed a place to call home, so it started as an “RV park” of sorts. MLF purchased recreational vehicles to provide housing and placed them at privately owned RV parks. Alan’s vision was for something more: a community village with permanent homes and community spaces clustered into neighborhoods.

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For four years, MLF sought to develop a community village within the City of Austin. However, when it sought planning and zoning approvals for the project, MLF encountered strong resistance from community members in the vicinity of the proposed development. Alan said the “ not in my backyard movement,” was strong and applied a lot of political pressure to city officials. As a result, MLF turned to its current location in Travis County, just outside the Austin city limits, where it did not need zoning permits.

Community First! is designed to encourage community, according to its website. Each of the tiny homes and microhomes in Community First! has a front porch to promote neighborly conversation and interactions. Groups of 40 to 50 homes are “… clustered around common areas with laundry rooms, restrooms and shower facilities, outdoor community kitchens and green space, all designed to encourage interactions among neighbors, helping them form relationships and build community.” Other amenities include a cinema, an amphitheater, a community market, an outdoor community dining area, a dog park, an organic farm, a chapel, a community center, a health clinic, and a Metro bus stop.

Can Community First! fill all of the 420 homes, I asked.  “We run at about an 85 to 88 percent occupancy rate,” Alan said. “There's always transition and turnover. Primary turnover is going to be to death, but we do have to evict people periodically.” When I followed up on Alan’s comment about evicting people, Alan told me that people pay rent to live in homes. “[N]umber one rule out here is you must pay rent, and we're very disciplined about that,” he said. To assist residents, Mobile Loaves & Fishes established Community Works, which offers other programs that support residents’ ability to earn a dignified income and use their God-given talent to do meaningful work  to make an income to support their lifestyle.

One such program is the Community Cinema. Community First! neighbors can earn a dignified income working in the concession stand at the outdoor amphitheater. Through the Community Art House, Village residents with artistic abilities are able to develop their talents and promote and sell their artwork.

Genesis Gardens spans more than 10 acres of the Village. It is a place where not only residents but also the broader Austin community can come together and grow vegetables, fruits, and nuts; raise chickens and ducks and collect eggs; tend beehives and harvest honey; and cultivate mushrooms and other items. Then, residents share their goods at free farmers' markets, providing Village residents with healthy and nourishing food. Most importantly, Village neighbors and community volunteers grow relationships with one another, providing a source of support and encouragement.

In addition to housing, Community First! has developed services for Village residents.  According to Alan, the primary services residents need are related to mental health and physical health.  “[The] average age is about fifty-five years old in the community. Average age of death is about sixty-one, so people [who] are coming [are] pretty sick and vulnerable,” Alan said. “[They suffer from] mental health issues [and] addiction issues. … it’s kind of a marinade of just about every human condition that you could imagine. …”

To address these issues, MLF established an on-site medical clinic  that is staffed by one of its partner agencies that provides indigent healthcare. MLF has on-site mental health care provided by Integral Care, the mental health authority for Travis County.

Of course, as a lawyer, I had to find out if Community First! had a legal clinic to help its residents with legal problems they may have. Alan told me that Community First! has a lot of volunteer lawyers helping with end-of-life issues and, periodically, releasing petty warrants that often are accumulated by people who live in poverty for criminal trespasses or public intoxication or “those kinds of things.”

I asked Alan how MLF was able to fund the Truck Ministry and Community First! along with all of the related programs. He said that basically everything has been privately funded. “The neighborhood that my family and I lived in, that I raised my family in, Westlake Hills is … one of ‘the’ neighborhoods in Austin. The [Catholic parish] I go to,  [has parishioners] with pretty high net worth, and then obviously my work [in the real estate development business]. In the real estate world, [I had experience] raising capital, and all that had me running in places where money was there,” Alan said “And so it turned out not to be that hard of a deal. Private individuals are really the essence of it. In the United States, 75 percent of all philanthropy comes from the decision of an individual, and an additional 15 percent happens through family foundations, people who had significant exits out of businesses that loaded money into a donor-advised fund or a family foundation. … We follow that model of working with individuals. … The stability of an individual donor is far more than the stability of an institutional-type donor.”

Next, I inquired if Alan ever thought that devoting himself to MLF and Community First! was a mistake or if he ever doubted that he was on the right path.  “Never doubted I was on the right path, knew we were on the right path, knew something needed to be done,” he said. “I didn't know the extent of how right [the] path we were [on]. We ran into a number of hurdles and speed bumps along the way, but never doubted that we could get this across the finish line—and no regrets.”

That MLF is on the right path is probably best illustrated by the success of its replication program, which, according to Alan, has taken off quite a bit, with about forty-five replicators around the country. Per Alan, MLF has also lifted off the streets over 1,000 people, served over 7,000,000 meals at the time we talked, and has had tens of thousands of volunteers who have touched MLF’s ministry in some form or fashion.

When asked to tell me what impact he hoped MLF would have on the Austin community, Alan was clear.“Well, I would love for Austin to be known as a city that developed a powerful model that’s a powerful puzzle piece in the mitigation of this pandemic of homelessness,” he said. “That would be awesome.”

Alan’s work with the homeless population has had a transformative effect on how he views men and women suffering from chronic homelessness. To illustrate, Alan told me this personal story: “I met my wife in 1981, and there used to be a taco stand, kind of a famous taco stand downtown, when downtown wasn't anything like what downtown is today, at the corner of Cesar Chavez Street and Congress Avenue, and we get out to go up to the taco truck, and she gets accosted by a panhandler —and, I jumped into the middle of that deal. The white knight on the white horse with the white hat and the suit of armor. And ripped that guy a new [one] and basically told him that he needed to go get a job and get out of this deal. And, I reflect back on that moment, really affectionately, knowing that Jesus was upstairs with an alligator tear coming down one side of his face, but a big, giant Cheshire grin on the other side of his face, knowing what was in my future. So, I, along with many, many, many other people, have been transformed as to how we view the stereotypes of our friends that find themselves out there.”

As for the most rewarding part of this journey, Alan said this: “The number one goal at Mobile Loaves & Fishes … is to transform the paradigm as to how people view the stereotype of the homeless, and in an hour tour of our Village, I can take somebody from the Alan Graham that was defending his future wife at the taco stand into somebody that's going to be taking somebody to McDonald’s and buying them breakfast. That's probably what I love the most about what we get to do.”

Maybe all of us should spend an hour with Alan Graham touring the Community First! Village. Like Alan, we, too, might find ourselves being transformed in our thinking about our homeless brothers and sisters.

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Endnotes

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Author

Rod Kubat

Nyemaster Goode PC

Rod Kubat is a shareholder in the Des Moines, Iowa office  of Nyemaster Goode, P.C., the largest Iowa based law firm, where he represents closely held, privately owned companies in a wide array of industries and lenders...

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Author

Rod Kubat

Nyemaster Goode PC

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