Mission Next Door our Hero!
Click the Links below to see more work by Mission Next Door!
Community Spirit
As a new business with the main focus of serving the community with healthful foods, John and I have seen and been both blessed and impressed by the degree to which the community has supported our efforts both as customers who appreciate our produce and as neighbors willing to render hands on support as we have recovered from nature's occasional meteorological shocks. Like most budding small businesses we have put our major initial effort into the infrastructure needed to support production and harvest of our produce. The violent wind storm (mini-tornado?) that struck our farm in May ?of 2020 caused structural damage to our home that could not be ignored nor immediately repaired with our production priorities.
In April of this year John finally contacted Mission Next Door, who had offered to help with some of the restoration on the main house in the previous year. Mission Next Door is a home repair ministry that serves the residents of Rockbridge and surrounding counties with critical home repair needs. In the past 14 years they have completed over 205 home repair projects for folks who were physically or financially unable to meet those needs in a timely fashion. Mission Next Door answered our call and , after evaluating the prospects of repair of some of our most pressing needs, accepted the challenge of restoring the structural and functional integrity of our badly damaged and deteriorating 1900 era two story addition. These were repairs that others had deemed beyond reclamation. Five months later potential condemnation of this part of the house has been avoided, and we have two very functional lower story rooms that will serve as our kitchen and dining room for the main house. We also have a new roof, a repaired upper porch supported by 8 new posts and 48 feet of picketed safety railing. The progress in this project from start to finish has been documented in the sequential imagery presented below.
Many of you commented on the steady progress in this project over the 5 summer months, and we have been eager tour guides when asked for a show of the latest progress. The costs of this project to us had been $0.00, but MND for which a typical project costs around $1000, have been substantial. MND has invested over $15,500 in this project to date and over 300 mostly volunteer hours of labor. While they have assured us that they have been richly rewarded by the satisfaction of helping , they have also significantly depleted their project support reservoir to meet other critical needs in the area (typically involving around 20 projects per year). MND has to rely on private donations, support from four area churches, and grant applications to adequately support their work each year. We feel this is an outstanding program of community support and hope you will consider donating to their most worthy cause. I have attached a trifold flier highlighting the history, mission, and contact information for MND and how you can help support it. (Also see nprov.org for the New Providence web access). We hope you will strongly consider supporting MND now and in the future as they are clearly neighbors helping neighbors in very significant and lasting ways. We have certainly been blessed by their help this year.