Parker Street Ministries

Parker Street Ministries is committed to Gospel-centered, holistic transformation of impoverished neighborhoods beginning in Lakeland, Florida's Parker Street neighborhood. Volunteers and staff impact lives through stabilizing activities in four core areas: lifetime learning, financial fitness, beautiful neighborhood and healthy community. Many staff and former staff live in the neighborhood in order to understand and address problems through relationships, listening, and shared experiences. We passionately believe our work is vital. Without our efforts and partnerships with other organizations, the crime characteristic of under-served neighborhoods proliferates, significant education and income gaps develop, substandard housing continues, and the effects of isolation, with its corresponding hopelessness and depression, remain unaddressed. We serve an impoverished, high crime area with 650 addresses. Replication is part of our mission so that as successful programs develop, the intention is to help other agencies repeat them in similar areas. We are excited to already be sharing practices with other ministries in the southeast. Because of decades of brokenness, meaningful change will be a generational process. Our work is slow and plodding, but even in the short term, our strategies move us forward. We desire to see neighbors who are: -influential lifetime learners who reach their full potential; -living in a mixed-income neighborhood containing exceptional businesses and housing; -financially healthy stewards and generous through dependence on God; and -pursuing healthy community as all people are created in God’s image.