Mustard Seed Society

Hello everyone! We trust everyone had a wonderful Christmas and happy New Year. Ours was busy, as usual, but we are blessed to have so much happening at the farm. I wanted to share just how great God has been to Mustard Seed. 2016 was another wonderful year with many opportunities for ministry in our community. We served over 700 kids this year! We continued ministering at the barn each week to the high school groups, special needs groups, Camp Lewis Academy, and The St. Clair Co. Day program. We also provide our program to The Strong Girls, from Birmingham, and Magnolia Creek, each month. We had a ton of fun offering two camps for The Boys and Girls Club from Pell City each summer and a special memorial camp for the teens of the Boys and Girls program in memory of Officer Woods. The suicide prevention classes for the surrounding high schools are in full swing, serving almost 600 kids alone this year! AND we are only half way through the school year! Busy, busy, busy for God’s Kingdom!!

We have continue our programbegan a new adventure in 2016. We have made three trips with several of the horses to Pell City High School in order to minister to the special needs children that are unable to make the trip to the barn. With the help of the Agricultural Science class and Pell City High School, we have been able to share lots of love and fun with many children that we would not have been able to reach otherwise. We are so excited to be able to fill this great need for these young people. These teens are becoming more and more responsive to the horses with each visit. We cannot wait to see what this year holds for them!

We want to say a special thank you to the members of the greeter team at Church Of The Highlands. Kenny Todd did a fine job of rallying his folks to do some hard farm labor- cleaning fence lines, building porches, painting round pens, and building a beautiful hay shed. We are also grateful to Gary Liverette and his guys from Alpha Ranch for covering the gables of the hay shed.

Last, but certainly not least, we must say a tremendous “THANK YOU!!” to everyone who donated to Mustard Seed Society in 2016. Your contributions of time, prayer, and finances have blessed us in being able to minister to these kids. We continually thank God for each of you!

2017 is turning out to be an exciting year!

We plan to continue working with Camp Lewis, The Attention girls home, the Boys and Girls Club and The Day Program just as we have in many years past. We are working with Dr. Dowdy, principal at Pell City High School, to resume our program for ninth grade at risk  and special  needs youth to come to the farm during the week for sessions with the horses. We plan to continue our suicide prevention classes in our county schools. Hoping, like last year, to be in every school by the end of the 2016-2017 school year.

We are working on a new program, Cutting to Cope,  this year! We hope to provide a Cutting to Cope program to all schools in our county by Fall of 2017.

We  have two new programs that are in planning stages.  We will provice  further details at a later date on these  programs.  Please  pray for us as we plan these programs for our youth.

As you can see, we have a very busy year planned. We appreciate your continued support and prayers as we help the young people in our community!

I know it might be hard to tell from the picture, but this is Kenny Todd! An incredibly giving individual who is not afraid to be the hands and feet of Jesus. He is currently by himself at the new hay barn,  in the July heat, putting the shingles on the roof. The heat index was upwards of 110 degrees while this picture was taken, and yet he is tirelessly working! This is the fourth weekend Kenny has been to the farm to complete this task and according to him, he isn’t finished. He still plans to return, as a volunteer mind you, to finish the detail work. This project would not have been possible without Kenny’s expertise and willingness to do Kingdom work. Even though we may never be able to express how much we appreciate Kenny’s hard work and dedication to our vision, I know he is storing up treasures in heaven!

Mustard Seed has had a great year. We were able to serve Coosa Valley Youth Services’ Camp Lewis and Attention home, St. Clair Co. Day Program,  The Strong Girls from Jefferson Co. Family Court, and 3 groups of teens from Pell City High School, including a group of special needs teens.

We did 3 summer day camps for the boys and girls at the Boys and girls club in Pell City.  We are excited that we were able to offer our Suicide Prevention Program in every high school in our county. We offered tutoring class each Thursday for the teens in our HS program and saw math grades make a big turn around!

This year we hope to offer all the programs again to these groups.  Our new endeavor will be to offer abstinence classes for the 6th grade classes in our county in collaboration with the St. Clair Children’s Advocacy Center.

Much work has been done at the barn – Thanks primarily to the wonderful folks at The Church of The Highlands and their Greeter groups!  They did major clean up on fence lines, painted fences and round pens, repaired the barn, built a porch by the bathrooms, (way better than the wobbly cinder blocks we called steps.), cleaned LOTS of tack and built a beautiful hay barn!  They were AMAZING!  Many hours of labor , not to mention their financial contribution to all the projects.  We are so very grateful!  Words could never express how much their contributions meant to us – especially that they cared so much for our kids.

We are so blessed at Mustard Seed to have received generous donations from Corporate Sponsors

THE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION OF GREATER BIRMINGHAM

HONDA MANUFACTURING OF ALABAMA

THE REMY FUND

BENJAMIN MOORE COMPANY

Thanks to our generous corporate donors and our private donors Mustard Seed Society has been able to provide Equine Assisted Therapy to 9 groups of teens on a regular basis.  We have presented Suicide Prevention training in al the county high schools and several groups in Calhoun and Jefferson counties.

We continue to acquire rescue horses and horses who seem to have lost their usefulness in other arena.  Here, however, they teach our teens valuable lie shills and offer enormous comfort and emotional support.