The People Who Give Us Courage to Keep Going

Every "why" in our work has a face behind it. One of those faces belongs to Christina.

We met Christina years ago as a single mother living on Crescent Street. Back then, that whole street was neglected and trashed out, the kind of block people drove past quickly (if they had to) and didn't think twice about. Her backyard happened to sit right along a stretch we set out to clean during one of our first Love the Hill summer projects, a street that had been overtaken by vegetation and illegal dumping so completely that most neighbors forgot it even existed.

We didn't know Christina well yet. We just knew that behind the fence we were working on, there was a single mom raising her kids in the middle of all that neglect, doing it alone, the way a lot of moms on The Hill end up doing it. We showed up with trash bags and tools and a crew of volunteers, and we started hauling. Trip after trip, truckload after truckload, until a street that had been forgotten started to look recognizable, useful. Maybe even like somewhere a kid might actually want to play.

Christina noticed. More than that, she stayed.

That's the part of this story that still gets us. A lot of people cheer from their porch when a crew comes through and cleans up a block, and that's fine, that's normal, that's most people. Christina wasn't most people. She started showing up. Not for one project, not for one summer, but again and again, year after year, until "showing up" stopped being something she did and started being something that was just true about her. She became one of those people on her street who genuinely cared about her neighbors, who noticed who was struggling and who needed a hand, who treated the whole block like it was her responsibility to watch over, with no title and no paycheck attached to any of it.

Somewhere along the line, that caring turned into real, consistent commitment. Christina became one of the most faithful volunteers for the food outreach that a local ministry runs right out front of our building, off our steps, every single time it opens. She's never been paid a dime for it. She just shows up, week after week, year after year, and helps get food into the hands of neighbors who need it. The whole rhythm of that outreach, the lines, the boxes, the sense that somebody actually cares who's standing in front of them, runs smoother and warmer because Christina is there. On top of that, she's at every block party we host, not just as a guest but as someone who helps make sure the whole thing runs smoothly, keeping an eye out and watching our backs to make sure everyone understands that there’s enough love to go around. On her own time, she's taken a stab at gardening too, planting her own flowers and doing her part to make her block a little more beautiful, one little flower box at a time.

Somewhere in all of that showing up, something else started happening in Christina's life too. She found faith. She found purpose. And along the way, she found Michael, the man who would become her husband.

When they decided to get married, they didn't just invite us to the wedding. They asked to have it in our yard.

We said yes before they finished asking.

Standing in that same yard where we'd once planned a street cleanup, watching Christina, a woman we'd met as a tired single mom on a street nobody wanted to claim, marry Michael and start a new life, finding God and finding purpose in the same breath, we understood something about this whole ministry we hadn't fully understood before. We didn't just clean up Crescent Street. We watched a life get rebuilt on it, one choice, one Saturday, one flower bed at a time. 

That's the thing about this work that statistics will never capture. You can count the truckloads of trash hauled off a street. You can't always count what happens in a person over years of being loved by a neighborhood that refuses to give up on them. Christina didn't need us to fix her block. She needed people who were going to stay long enough to watch her become who she was becoming, and then stand in a yard with her on the day she married the man she'd planned to build the rest of her life with.

It's rarely the big, flashy things that end up mattering most in this work. It's the little things, done over and over, year after year, that actually build something. It's somebody showing up to the same outreach every single week. It's somebody watching out for you at a block party without being asked to. It's somebody planting flowers on their own block because they've decided it's worth caring for. Faithfulness and consistency, more than any single grand gesture, are what hold a community together. People like Christina are the reason we have the courage to keep going. Knowing that more people like her will show up, again and again, to continue what we started is what makes all of this feel sustainable instead of impossible.

That's why we do what we do. Not because a street looked bad and we wanted it to look better, although it did, and we did. But because somewhere underneath the trash and the neglect, there was a woman like Christina, raising her kids alone, waiting for someone to notice that she was worth staying for. We noticed. And she turned around and became one of the people this whole community leans on,  including us.