St. Luke’s UMC, east Winter Garden partner for community improvement

WINTER GARDEN  Five years ago, St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Dr. Phillips set out on missions work to help improve the lives of children who live in poverty or low-income areas.

Now, five years later, the east Winter Garden neighborhood has volunteers helping children get involved in arts-based extracurricular activities, Habitat for Humanity homes in the works and its own neighborhood alliance program.

Lynette Fields, St. Luke’s executive director of missions, has been on staff for 20 years and said that the church’s community transformation initiative aims to end poverty, one family and one neighborhood at a time. The partnership with east Winter Garden began in 2013 following extensive research to identify the best place to start.

“We had identified within missions that we wanted to improve the life of children who live in poverty and experience ongoing hunger. We knew we had to help stabilize families,” Fields said. “We spent about 10 months interviewing organizations and residents and had focus groups. We were looking at three areas and east Winter Garden seemed like the best fit.”

St. Luke’s and the East Winter Garden Neighborhood Alliance have worked together over the last few years on many community-enhancement projects. Most recently, though, St. Luke’s and EWGNA officially opened its newest project — a hospitality house — to community members and volunteers. 

The church bought the property, located at 1000 Lincoln Terrace in Winter Garden, and transformed it from an abandoned house into one used for hospitality. It has office space and offers a place for volunteers and EWGNA to have meetings during the week. 

And, on Saturday, Jan. 14 — before the city’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration — residents and volunteers celebrated the grand opening of the hospitality house. Fields said there must have been about 100 people in attendance, between residents, church members and volunteers.

“We see it as much as for the alliance as it is for St. Luke’s,” Fields said. “Our intention all along was to walk alongside the residents that are already here so that they could lead the change they want to see themselves, rather than us coming in as outsiders and determining for the neighborhood what they wanted to have done.”

Adam Hartnett, director of neighborhood ministry at St. Luke’s, said many of the residents have even begun to call the hospitality house their house. Looking back on the growth of the partnership between the neighborhood and the church in the past couple of years, it all started with a handful of community-improvement initiatives and the residents’ emotional investment.

In 2014, church staff partnered with the residents to survey their neighbors on what they wanted to see in their neighborhood. From there, community meetings began and everyone came up with the initiatives to improve education, economic stability, housing and overall neighborhood wellbeing. 

“Being able to partner with some of the organizations and the residents themselves — that’s the only way this could have happened. Without the investment of the people who live here, I can’t imagine being where we are now,” Hartnett said. “This is all an embodiment of St. Luke’s values — really getting into the heart of service and getting involved in the community — and this is really one of the many ways we’ve expressed those values in our communities.”

Contact Danielle Hendrix at [email protected].