Kerrville First United Methodist Church’s Food4Kids program provides food on the weekends for children experiencing food insecurity from our neighboring school, Nimitz Elementary. Other churches in our community have also adopted local schools in our county to be a blessing!  KFUMC is currently helping over 40 students who do not have enough nutritious food to sustain them throughout the weekends. Many families depend on breakfast and lunch for their children at school and when school is not in session, like on weekends, it provides a hardship for the family. Our awesome unpaid servants help with the shopping, packing, delivering and distributing of the food to make this program possible. We partner with the San Antonio Food Bank to help with our Food4Kids program. We also partner with our Mustard Seed Ministries to provide support for the entire family throughout the year, including school vacation breaks. The response from the teachers, parents and students has been so positive! If you would like to be part of this outreach ministry in the fall, contact Beth Palmer at [email protected] for more information. Thank you for supporting Food4Kids! ​

As the outreach ministry director for Kerrville First United Methodist Church’s Mustard Seed Ministries, Beth Palmer arrived at the church’s Light on the Hill at Mount Wesley facility at 6 a.m. on Monday. 
​

She was ready to receive the delivery from the San Antonio Food Bank — one of the largest to be delivered to Kerr County. For the last few weeks, the Food Bank has made headlines across the state for massive food distributions, including one that attracted 10,000 people in San Antonio. 


On Monday morning, Palmer wasn’t the only one waiting for the delivery. There was already a line  of five cars waiting for the four 18-wheelers to bring 63,420 pounds of food to the Mustard Seed Ministries, which was also partnering with St. VIncent De Paul of Kerrville.

KERRVILLE, Texas — Unemployment has not discriminated due to population size.
Northwest of San Antonio, in Kerr County, more families are looking for resources to meet their needs.

A food pantry in Kerrville is hoping to help hundreds of families in need. 
“It’s people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors,” said Beth Palmer, the Outreach Coordinator for Kerrville United Methodist Church and Light on the Hill.

The ministry hosted their first mass food distribution Monday. Volunteers from several Kerrville churches and groups lent a hand.

“We don’t want anyone to be hungry in this time,” said Palmer.
Usually, the group provides 12,000 pounds of food per month to the community, but they received almost 64,000 pounds of food from the San Antonio Food Bank to feed even more families.

​Some of us have big buts (the one “t” variety, not the other kind). By that, I mean we live in constant emotional and relational tension because we live in the land of but.

• I know my BFF didn’t mean to be a jerk, but …
• I know my spouse isn’t perfect, but …
• I know my son is trying to change, but …
• I know my boss didn’t mean to wound me, but …

Sadly, we’ve created a “yeah, but” world that is killing us. It’s robbing us of joy and creating unnecessary tension in our relationships. Worst of all, it’s setting us up to love conditionally.

The second we add a “but,” we add a condition or an excuse. We are saying to others, “I know the right thing to do, but my choice to do the right thing is subject to your choice to do the right thing.” We rationalize our half-hearted love and acceptance of others based on their actions.

In the fall of 2021, eight of our KFUMC staff members participated in two days of training on the low ropes course at Light on the Hill. A low ropes course is a ground-based obstacle course designed to encourage team building and personal development. The #1 benefit to participation in low ropes elements is outcomes such as trust building. Other common outcomes are self confidence, team cooperation, decision making, communication skills, positive risk-taking, leadership skills, and goal setting, to name a few. Our group had fun, worked hard, laughed harder and grew to recognize and depend on each other’s strengths. We leaned on each other and trusted in each other to complete the tasks at hand. Participating in the activities took me out of my comfort zone and if I hadn’t been able to lean on (literally) and trust my group, I absolutely would not have been able to problem solve and successfully navigate the course.

This reminds me of how we have to lean on and trust in God to make it through each day and navigate life. Our natural preference is to plan everything out but God wants us to depend on Him constantly, trusting Him to guide us and support us as we go. As the problems of the world seem heavier every day, it is so good to be able to lean on God and trust Him to give us strength as we need it.

Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all of your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding.  Proverbs 3:5 AMP

-Beth Palmer, LOTH Outreach Director

Light on the Hill has been invited and has agreed to be part of the  H. E. Butt Foundation’s Kerrville Capacity Building Program to maximize our impact by strengthening our capacity to become even more effective and efficient as an organization. The H. E. Butt Foundation’s Kerrville Capacity Building Program consists of select nonprofits that agree to work together for 11-months at becoming more efficient, effective, and cooperative. The goal of this program is to help vital nonprofits like ours operate at peak performance. The H. E. Butte Foundation desires to cultivate wholeness in people and institutions for the transformation of communities.

We are so excited and honored to be chosen to participate in this inaugural year program in Kerr County! Thank you H. E. Butte Foundation!
 

​The mission of Emmaus is to empower leaders to be the hands and feet of Christ. The Walk to Emmaus is a spiritual renewal experience intended to strengthen the local church through the development of Christian disciples and leaders. We were blessed to host the Koinonia group out of Hondo and Lakehills this past Thursday through Sunday at Light on the Hill at Mount Wesley. Our campus was joyful with the sound of people praying, praising, listening, learning, eating, and sleeping. This was our first Walk to Emmaus to host in two and a half years due to the pandemic.

We are so grateful to all of the unpaid servants who worked so faithfully for the last two years to clean, paint, put in new flooring, replace old electrical and plumbing fixtures so that we have a nice, fresh sleeping rooms for our guests.

We are so grateful to all of the unpaid servants who helped prep, cook, and serve delicious food throughout the retreat. We have a fantastic servant-hearted food ministry team! I hope you will prayerfully consider joining us. It is a great group!

We have five more Walks to Emmaus scheduled for 2022, at Light on the Hill at Mount Wesley that we are very excited about! We are also encouraged by a new spirit of renewal for hosting Hill Country Emmaus Walks in the near future! We will keep you posted.

Thank you so much for your prayers and encouragement as we continue the rich tradition of transformation of lives at Mount Wesley!

Beth Palmer

​As part of Methodist Healthcare Ministries' efforts to advance health equity, a video series has been produced featuring community voices from across South Texas highlighting how they're working in collaboration with neighbors, local leaders and organizations to help more people with a fair opportunity to thrive.

The first video highlights the Hope For Health Collaborative, located in Kerrville. This organization works to revitalize the Doyle Community, a historically isolated and segregated African-American and Hispanic neighborhood.

In 2021, Light on the Hill @ Mount Wesley was the recipient of the DASH Community Impact Cohorts 1 and 2 Grant.  Millie Goode served as the Project Director and worked with Beth Palmer, Outreach Director, and Theresa Standage, Wesley Nurse, to implement the grant. DASH (Data Across Sectors of Health, led in partnership with the Michigan Public Health Institute and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, identifies barriers, opportunities, promising practices and indicators of progress for multi-sector collaborations to share data for community health improvement.  DASH aims to align health care, public health, and other sectors to systematically compile, share, and use data to understand factors that influence health and develop more effective interventions and policies. The specific DASH project at Light on the Hill @ Mount Wesley is Pathways to Health & Wholeness, an integrated framework of care pathways for a marginalized population within health and food security categories.  Data-sharing collaborative partners are Mustard Seed, Peterson Health, Raphael Free Community Clinic, New Hope Counseling, Kerr County Inter-Agency Network, and Kerr Konnect.  Pathway strategies are designed to give voice to marginalized community members within the Kerrville/Doyle community in assessing their health and wellness needs & determining desired outcomes.  READ THE RELATED ARTICLE BELOW.

__________________________________
​

By Solomon Collins

​BACKGROUND
As a National Program Office (NPO) of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH), works with communities across the country to build local capacity for multi-sector collaborations and data sharing efforts to inform an evidenced-based national movement toward a Culture of Health. The Community Impact Contracts (CIC) funding program offers access to direct technical assistance, targeted funds, subject matter expertise, and a supported peer cohort working together to pursue equity and increase sustainable community capacity to lead and leverage data system development.


DASH is proud to support projects that center communities and work to eliminate structural inequity through multisector, data sharing efforts. Light on the Hill at Mount Wesley, a CIC awardee, exemplifies what it truly means to be a catalyst for others in understanding the endless possibilities for what happens when you share data.


Light on the Hill at Mount Wesley, a faith-based 501(c)(3) public charity devoted to improving community health based in Kerrville, Texas, is a shining example. Six ministries located on the campus offer services related to healthcare and health-related needs: Kerr Konnect (an on-call volunteer driver service for young and elderly adults), Families and Literacy (educational programs including the area’s only GED prep course program), the Mustard Seed Food Pantry, an Education and Exercise Center, a Nutrition Center, and Wesley Nurse (the largest 80+ site outreach program in South Texas). They used their CIC award to purchase licenses for a platform to help them see where the coordinated services they offer were most needed, and where they made an impact.