Love City

Love City is foremost a community not just an organization.  We seek to empower our neighbors to build their community, giving them resources and knowledge to create a beautiful vibrant neighborhood.  Love is the foundation of everything we do, if we don’t teach people how to love each other, true transformational change will never happen.  We believe there are four pillars that every health community needs: access to quality education, access to quality healthcare, affordable housing, and economic stimulation.  Everything we do fits into one of these four pillars.   Even though our programs and initiatives change over time in response to the needs of the neighborhood, they always fit into one of these four pillars.  Open Gym from the early days of Love City has now grown into a full community school called Mighty Oak Academy.  The fish fry that started in the back of the gym grew into a full restaurant for several years.  Programs come and go, but the four pillars remain as a guiding principle of the work of building a community.

Neighbors Loving Neighbors

If people don’t love one another, we can throw all the resources in the world at a problem, but it won’t change.  Our tagline, neighbors loving neighbors, highlights a core value of Love City.  We try to not only bring our neighbors that live in our physical neighborhood together, but also bring together our neighbors from across town.  We call it bringing together our neighbors near and our neighbors far.  We want to teach our neighbors to love one another.  It doesn’t matter which side of the city you live on, people are people, and everyone deserves to be loved.  The more we come together, the healthier and more vibrant our respective neighborhoods will become.

Love City Programs

All our programs are based on our mission of loving people as they are.  Each program is designed to not only fit into the four pillars but also lift up our neighbors through love and teach neighbors near and far to love one another.  As the community grows and develops over time, programs change, grow and morph.  What started out as an afterschool program of open gym and art club, has now grown into a full school age K-8.  The preschool that we had to close during the pandemic is moving to another building recently purchased by Love City so much needed early childhood education can be provided in the neighborhood.  We seek to build economic stimulation into everything we do.  While we are a registered 501c3 we seek ways to generate income rather than fully rely on donations to keep programs going.  We started with a fish fry in the back of the gym, which then moved over to the old parish hall of St Cecilia church once Love City purchased that compound.  We taught entrepreneur classes to our neighbors, helping them understand how to run their own businesses, we have a screen print company called St C’s Tees.  As the needs of the community change, programs will also change.

Youth Programs

A key part of any community is its youth.  The very first Love City program was an open gym at the Mackin building for youth ages 8 – 18.  Over the years youth programs have changed and evolved.  Love City has several large events throughout the year for the whole community but with a focus on providing activities for young people.  Spring Carnival is a family friendly event full of games, food, prizes, dunk tank, bouncy houses etc.  Throughout the summer we have “party on the porch”, a weekly community gathering and a place for kids to enjoy being kids in the summer months.  Even our fall festival has the hayride in the hood, a perennial favorite among the kids in the neighborhood.  Summer camps have also been a staple at Love City.  While summer camps have now moved under the school of Mighty Oak Academy, camps are still open to any kid from the neighborhood.

Volunteer at Love City

Part of bringing together neighbors near and neighbors far is having opportunities for people to come partner together.  All areas of Love City use volunteers in various capacities.  Everything from skilled labor, to reading tutoring and everything in between is needed at Love City.  There is never a shortage of work to be done.  We love to have our neighbors near and our neighbors far come together to work to better their city.

Being Love

Central to the mission of Love City is loving our neighbors.  We believe that you can’t just tell people to love one another, you must show them love.  Over the years we have been focused on making sure we “are love” to both our neighbors near and our neighbors far.  “Being love” to our neighbors can take on many forms, from picking up trash in an alleyway, to helping an elderly neighbor sift through the process to close a bank account after her checkbook was stolen, to providing a house for a family to rent according to their income and not market rates.  It’s all love.

Empowering People

Since the beginning of Love City, a core goal has been empowering the community to do the work themselves.  While this might seem straightforward there are many things that nonprofits, charities, organizations, churches etc. have done over the decades in our neighborhood that have taken the power to self determine away from the community.  While there is a place for meeting basic needs in a time of crisis, long term handouts create a dependency that robs people of their creativity and authority to make their own decisions.  At Love City we focus on teaching skills that create wisdom such as entrepreneurship, creativity, trades etc, not handing out food, clothing etc.  When you put the resources and knowledge in the hands of the people, they take back their power to create their own community and thrive.

What Does Love Look Like

Love is the core foundation of being able to build a community and empower people to do it.  When we seek to build a culture of loving people as they are, we have a practical set of guidelines that we follow.  We have a list of things we do, and things we don’t do.  The core tenants of what we do center around being patient with one another, gentle and kind to all and being a safe place for people to express themselves.  The list of what we don’t do is much longer but centers around not being easily offended, not being disrespectful to our neighbors near and far and never taking failure as defeat.  We strive to keep these tenants at the forefront of everything we do so we can show all our neighbors what love looks like.

Love As A Verb

Love is not passive; it is an action that takes deliberate choices day in and day out.  As we have built a culture of loving people as they are over the years, there have been countless situations where we have made the choice to show love to our neighbors near and far.  These choices have, step by step, worked to build the culture of loving people as they are.  Similar to how we view empowerment, the choices we make to love don’t look like what a traditional charity, nonprofit or organization might make.  Sometimes giving out a free meal is not the loving decision, and sometimes it is the thing that shows love.  Every day we build relationships with our neighbors by listening to their hopes and dreams and finding ways to empower them to achieve those dreams.

Love City Core Values

Central to our mission and vision are our core values.  These core values embody our goal of empowering the community to build their own neighborhood.  Our values start with dreaming big.  We want all our neighbors, whether they are coming to participate in a program or work on staff, to have big dreams for themselves and their community.  We seek humility.  It’s important that we put others first and are humble.  We don’t judge our neighbors.  We want to lift them up, not keep them down.  We believe in a loving community.  Without knowing and living out of the power of love, our vision of a community won’t happen.  We are invested.  We are here for the long term to uplift the community and provide resources and knowledge for them to thrive.

Safe Place

As one of our basic beliefs about how to love, providing a safe place, is more than just providing a physical space that is safe.  Emotional, physical and spiritual safety are all important.  At Love City we seek to provide a safe place of shelter for all those involved, both our neighbors near and far.  A safe place will allow for expression without fear of being exposed or shamed.  It is something that we seek to embed in our culture.  Ultimately the goal is to transform the spirit through love.