Edmundite Missions has been serving the men, women and children living in poverty-stricken communities throughout the Deep South since 1937. Through our ministry, we meet immediate needs by providing food, clothing and shelter for thousands of people. We also exemplify service to solutions by offering mentorship, apprenticeships and educational programs for youth and adults, providing a pathway towards self-reliance.
Guided today by our mission statement and the faithfulness of our donors, we continue our work of addressing the extreme poverty prevalent within the Deep South while imparting a sense of dignity to each and every person we serve.
Headquartered in Selma, Alabama, the Mission remains a force for good, providing for the basic needs of those in poverty in Alabama’s Blackbelt. In 2020, facing the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and Hurricane Zeta, the Mission saw increased demand. We served over 340,000 hot meals and gave out over 285 tons of food along with seeing 35% increases in our social ministry and housing ministries. With schools closed due to the pandemic, the Missions quickly opened Academic Resource Centers, providing access to hardware, internet, and tutoring for an average of 40 students each day.
While nutrition remains the cornerstone of the Missions, we also seek to turn our services into solutions for those entrusted to our care, developing and executing programs that place our clients on a path to self-reliance. The impact of these transformative programs since their inception has been amazing.
Our Bridges at the Missions Apprenticeship Program offers paid apprenticeships inside the Missions, developing both soft and technical skills needed to compete in the job market. Every graduate of the program has gone on to full-time employment or post-secondary education.
Our Forward with the Missions Fellowship Program offers financial assistance to students seeking to matriculate from their LPN program and complete their RN degree. While many academic costs are often covered, the Missions offers the type of assistance that allows students to focus on their school work and clinical hours instead of needing to work full time to care for their children. An LPN makes an average of $23,000 a year while an RN who graduates from the Forwards program earns an average of $53,000 a year.
We recently began a redesign of our programs in our most rural areas, with the long-term goal of tying our food ministries to health through nutrition and to economic impact by working with small, African-American farming operations. Recently, the first impact evidence of our work towards this goal has been published by The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD), the world’s only peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal focused solely on food and farming-related community development. <https://foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/article/view/930/903>
The Missions looks forward to building on our eighty plus year legacy of being the hands and feet of Christ for those in need in the Deep South. We’re also excited to continue expanding our transformative programs aimed at providing a path to self-reliance that breaks the cycle of poverty.
Please enjoy the video below for an in-depth look at the history of the Missions.