For the past two years we have made a big mistake. With the daily stress of Covid bearing down on family, friends and partners of Urban Community Life, we decided to give everyone a break from our traditional fundraising letter. We didn’t want to add to anyone’s stress.

If our letters are primarily about raising money and not about raising hope, then perhaps, we would have been correct, but they are not. Our letters are about inspiration, reassurance and the audacity to tell the ways God is continuing to move forward, especially when times are dark. It seems that Urban Community Life’s greatest miracles have been embedded in the Covid health crisis, and instead of giving you letters of encouragement, we stopped sharing what God is doing. So we pray this letter brings you much joy!!

There is so much to share with you. Three months before Covid shut everything down in March of 2020, we received a great gift of ninety-five acres of raw, unimproved land. A sweet little sanctuary on Lookout Mountain in which to grow and expand our efforts. In addition to our urban youth agricultural summer program, we have plans to add a full academic year initiative. We also plan to add a new health recovery program where families can come for multiple weeks and experience healing.

For UCLife, Covid has been the proving ground for what we have been training our youth for since day one – the critical issues of food production and people protection. Covid has only deepened our commitment to the importance of bringing young people out of the city to experience a safe place of fresh air, clean water, healing nutrition, restorative sleep, invigorating sunshine, manual farm exercise and spiritually oriented service to others.

We would like to share our adventures in homesteading with urban youth and the steep learning curve of inconvenience. Of living in cargo trailers, sleeping in tents and hammocks. Of cooking under tarps during strong winds and rainstorms. Of building composting toilets and outdoor showers, and finally seeing fresh water gush from a newly dug well. Of sheep and goats and dogs and the beautiful damn deer. Of learning to manage all these animals without killing them when they eat your newly planted trees, flowers and bushes. Of the hours spent moving solar powered net fencing every few days to allow fresh grazing, and the never ending hours of walking behind a 34″ mower to maintain it all. Of seeing and shaping raw land into a tiny slice of heaven, a Garden of Eden for all, and the deep satisfaction of knowing your hands and God’s Spirit played a part.

We wish you could experience the things we have done by hand. The things that require the building of character. Like clearing acres of land and forming massive burn piles of brush and trees. We wish you could see our hands turn the soil as we plant 140 trees, 100 blueberry plants, 160 blackberry plants, 30 raspberry plants and digging thousands of feet of irrigation… and then, running the well dry. At this point we received a special surprise of six, 2,500 gallon water tanks. Farming is the job that takes over your family’s life. That’s a good thing.

We would like to share the many miracles we have been part of, everything from the donation and delivery of a new tiny house to an excavator showing up just in time to put in just enough driveway to get us to our destination.

But more than all that, if only you could be part of the energy of new beginnings, the testing of ideas and the cultivation of young minds. Of hearing young men face a future they can not imagine and becoming practical, all-round, useful men, who, in an emergency, can do the work necessary to be done as they honor this great gift of God’s treasure house.

Most of all, we wish you could experience the gratitude of it all. The enormous importance of it all. The weight of it all. The achievement of it all. The presence of God in all and through it all. Have hope, my friends, because God is still moving on this Earth!

We have been honored to walk this narrow path with you over the past several years and hope we continue to partner together in the years to come.

UCLife