Family Faith Builders: Go Near Ministry
Go Near Ministry was already serving the poor of inner-city Little Rock before a fateful Sunday service that changed everything.
“My whole family, my children grew up serving in the inner city,” says Executive Director Melody Taylor. “When my daughter was 14, she saw a video at church of people going overseas and doing mission work. She was like, ‘Can we go do that?’”
Interestingly, finding a location and willing mission-goers wasn’t particularly difficult. Taylor had an acquaintance who had traveled to an orphanage in Guatemala, and her daughter’s 14-year-old classmates were clamoring to go. The hard part, she says, was selling adults on what was a relatively new idea in central Arkansas.
“At first we met with a lot of resistance,” she says. “We were the only ones taking kids. But now, 10 years later, kids are going, families are going.”
Since that first trip comprised entirely of 14-year-old Arkansas girls and adult chaperones, Go Near has made regular mission trips abroad, first to Guatemala and more recently to Nairobi, Kenya. More than 300 individuals representing 31 churches have gone on mission, 30 at a time, ages 12 to 70.
Even as its overseas ministry has grown, Go Near hasn’t abandoned its efforts at home. Last year, the ministry launched Shop My Closet, a resale boutique in west Little Rock stocked with gently-worn women’s clothing, shoes and accessories.
“A lady in our community went with us [to Africa] in 2013 and again, we were serving orphans, widows, the populations that live in the slums,” Taylor says. “She came to me and said, ‘I know because you’re a nonprofit, you need funding, but it’s a very hard sell because it’s far away and people don’t get it.
The volunteer suggested a “shop my closet” event. She asked her friends to clean out their closets, built clothing racks and hosted a sale featuring the donated clothing. The idea proved to be popular and quickly grew into a full-time retail operation, with all Shop My Closet profits supporting various Go Near programs, including a vocational education program in Kenya which teaches women to sew. “At the end of the training they get their machine and they take these tests to be certified in Kenya at the top tier of seamstresses,” says Taylor.
In addition, Shop My Closet provides clothes free of charge to visiting missionaries, as well as formerly incarcerated women looking to get back into the workplace. Even unsold merchandise finds a home—between 300 to 500 pounds is donated weekly to local organizations.
For as much good as Go Near does for others, the impact on the people who participate in its ministries is equally profound. In fact, many former mission-goers have made the organization’s mission their life’s work: “Kids who started going with us when they were 12, who are now seniors in high school, are choosing majors in nonprofits, physical therapy, teaching—things that are ‘helping’ professions,” Taylor says.
“It really does ease into the souls of the young. In our culture, we’re so me-oriented; we don’t give kids opportunities to love others. When you see how kids in orphanages in third world countries live, you have a new perspective on how blessed you are that you have a home and you have electricity and food and more than one pair of clothes that don’t have holes in them. There’s great value in that.”
“Our mission statement is to take care of widows and orphans in distress. To do that you have to, ‘Go near,’ you have to know them and how they live and what their challenges are. It takes listening and being in a relationship.” —Melody Taylor, executive director of Go Near Ministry
For more information or to get involved, visit Go-Near.org.