Don’t know if you’ve heard about this; I had not until today.

I attended a breakfast meeting hosted by the Oliver Gospel Mission this morning, and director Wayne Fields spoke of that ministry’s plans to move beyond the current emphasis on homeless men to administer to homeless women and children.

This project is in the very early stages. No one knows yet where it will go or how much it will cost. He spoke of having another such meeting in the fall and hopefully knowing more by then. But here are some things I did pick up:

• With public housing in the community having a waiting list of 6,903, there are a lot of single women and moms with kids out on the street — or, in many cases, living in the woods. He spoke of one teacher he knows who has a class in which a third of the children are homeless. Existing agencies that address the needs of women and children are overwhelmed, and may turn away as many as 10 or 20 women in a day.
• OGM is taking great care to work with those agencies, and with others that work with the homeless — such as the coming Midlands Housing Alliance center — to avoid duplication or wasteful “competition.” He said he’s gotten a lot of encouragement from those quarters.
• He’s very mindful that as soon as he does have any idea where it will go — and while he doesn’t know, he suspects there’s a good probability it won’t be in the city of Columbia — he must bring the neighbors in on it. He knows the most dangerous threat to such an enterprise is allowing the neighbors to have any excuse even to suspect that anyone’s trying to sneak such a facility by them. The biggest issue isn’t the location or the cost — it’s the zoning.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing more about this, and offer the prayer that God will bless this enterprise which in all ways is seeking to do His work in the community.