These excellent projects were presented at our October 6th SOUP dinner

The dinner was held at the Kerbela Temple in South Knoxville.

  1. Woven Family Ministry: Woven's mission is to provide support services to Foster and Adoptive parents. We have a closet to provide essentials to foster parents getting an emergency foster placement. We are working towards sponsoring PATH classes to be available in the South Knoxville Area. Woven also exists to strengthen families and will have support groups to talk about the unique situations encountered by Foster and adoptive families. We are aligned with KAFCAM. KAFCAM is a local area foster and support network linking services for foster and adoptive families. All areas in Knoxville have a support ministry except South Knoxville and we feel it is time to engage in caring for our foster and adoptive community in Knoxville.
  2. Oddity Museum: A museum of the strangest things you'll ever see… urban legends, strange creatures, and medical oddities. It will be located inside Creature Seeker's Dark Market. It will be spooky but family friend and very affordable, at only a few dollars admission.
  3. Angels with One Wing: Working with Southern Market, a beautiful, established retail gift shop located in Bearden, I will have T-Shirts made up one design a month and all monies collected in the sell of the T-Shirts will go to an individual chosen for that month that has a special "need", whether it be money to support the medical transfer of an individual to Vanderbilt or any long-distance hospital, money that will help to buy a needed wheel-chair, people injured and unable to go to work until they recuperate. A mother with small children with a needed car repair… are just a few examples.
  4. People in the Garden: We would like to kickstart community involvement with the community garden at SEEED with a parent-child oriented weekend workshop. The parents and their kids will create signs for the garden, such as a ‘Come explore the Garden’ sign along with identification name tags for all the plants, to educate the community on what is all growing in the forest. Others will work together to construct more raised beds for the garden. After about an hour of painting and building, the parents and kids will partake in an interactive nutrition class, which will teach them the importance of healthy food and how to use produce from the garden in healthy recipes. We will have bowls of legumes, grains, seeds, vegetables, and fruits so the participants can see what is meant by a healthy plant-based diet. There will also be posters of categories of foods – foods that you should eat often, once in a while, or very rarely – and a sugar demonstration to show how much cane sugar corresponds with typical snacks. To go along with the take-home recipes, we will also have samples of food made from the recipes so the participants will be able to see how delicious eating healthy can be.