Common Ground Montgomery

Our community is over-run with drug addiction, gang violence, broken families, dilapidated housing, and most families living below the poverty level. It's easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged when you recognize the trajectory of over 1800 childrens lives, according to the odds, community history, and family patterns. Most of our kids are growing up in failing school systems, are surrounded by extreme levels of negative influence, and are not prepared to be successful in life by anyone's standards.

I realized years ago that poverty was much more than a lack of resources and opportunity, but rather a result of broken relationships. This is true for all people, not just those growing up in our community. My family and I realized that though we were resourced and "successful" in some ways, we were desperately impoverished in other areas of our lives. In short, we needed our neigbors and true community that was outside of just one race and socioeconomic status. Specifically, we were isolated racially and culturally from folks in our city.

Common Ground was created to help restore much of the brokenness in our community, but also in those who come to serve from without. By moving our family into this neighborhood, sharing life togther with our neighbors, loving on kids and adults in tangible ways, we have experienced first hand, and have recruited others into an experience of working together towards community transformation and wholeness and healing in our own lives.

My children are growing up with low income, cross racial, grandmothers that have adopted them as family and are experiencing a rich life in the middle of a distressed community as we do life togther. We are now seeing many kids choose not to go into gangs, choose not to drop out of school, and choose to make decisions that put them on a course for success. We are seeing a safety nets put into the lives of kids who have been neglected and abandoned on many levels, and are seeing beautiful transformation in many kids already, within the first five years.

Kids, who before were claiming their desire to have sex indiscriminately and sell drugs, are now saying they want to pursue careers, get married one day, and be true husbands, fathers, wives, and mothers. Young teenagers are now investing in younger kids as they are being invested in by positive role models provided through our vision.

-Bryan Kelly, Founder of Common Ground Montgomery