Helping people make a house a home, Renewed Hope, a ministry of the Grinnell Friends Church, provides people with the home furnishings they need to start again. In just the last three months, Renewed Hope has been able to provide 110 families in Grinnell and the surrounding area with furniture, all for free.
The project started in August of 2021 when Angie Radcliffe, a guidance counselor for Brooklyn-Guernsey-Malcom (BGM) Community School District in Brooklyn, reached out on Facebook asking for furniture donations for a student whose family was moving out of a homeless shelter. Within a matter of hours, Radcliffe had enough furnishing to fill the student’s new home.
That initial act of service showed Radcliffe that she could provide for her community, connecting those in need with furniture that might otherwise end up in the landfill. In November of 2021, Renewed Hope became an official ministry of the Grinnell Friends Church, expanding to provide nearly 400 families with furniture in 2024 alone.
“This is for sure God’s ministry,” Radcliffe said. “It was just an idea put into my brain, it’s the way that things have fallen into place and the way they continue to fall into place … I used to have to call and beg and plead for volunteers. I remember many of our Saturdays thinking, ‘How are we gonna do this? We don’t have enough people.’ And every single time just random people would show up and I had no idea who they were and I would meet them — but I mean things just work out.”
When coming up with the business plan for the ministry, Radcliffe was intentional about how the organization was going to refer to the people on both ends of the furniture exchange — givers and receivers.
“I did that on purpose so that we were on a level playing field,” Radcliffe said. “There is no judgment, there just isn’t any … we try really hard to just show compassion, meet them where they are. We don’t expect them to tell us why or what … Just, what do you need? How can we help you?”
In January of 2024, the Ministry relocated from the four storage units they were working out of to the old Emergency Medical Services building on Park Street in Grinnell. The move happened around the time two leaders, Service Director Greg Lincoln and Secretary Sixta Hernandez, joined ministry leadership.
Hernandez, who acts as the sole Spanish interpreter — among other duties — said, “I fell in love with it once I saw it … Spanish is my first language, and I know how horrible it is to try to communicate having a need, and when there’s someone that understands you, it’s such a relief.”
The ministry’s growth has been in part thanks to word of mouth, especially within Hispanic communities around Grinnell. Responding to the outpouring of need, Hernandez encouraged Renewed Hope to double their open hours to include Wednesday from 9 to 11 a.m. as well as Saturday from 9 to 12 p.m.
“It has been wonderful not only for English speaking people but the Spanish speaking people,” Hernandez said. “They started saying, ‘There’s a Spanish-speaking girl there, she can talk to you.’”
“We were basically in the right place at the right time because there’s been a growing need,” Lincoln said. “We deal with it, and how we [address the need] helps with our growth.”
Despite early concerns, there have been enough givers to match that need. Renewed Hope receives furniture donations from all kinds of circumstances, from people clearing out a house after a parent passes to local hotels looking to revamp their interior decor.
“It’s empty compared to what it has been,” Lincoln said, gesturing around the building. “We’ve taken a lot of stuff out in the last two weeks, two and a half weeks. It echoes in here now and it wasn’t that way two weeks ago.”
Lincoln, who manages the phone lines for the ministry, reports an increased number of calls from surrounding cities Husky, Newton and Marshalltown, expanding the outreach of receivers.
“Lutheran Services of Iowa wanted to come down from Des Moines and meet with us,” Radcliffe said. “They are planning to come down and get furniture when they need it.”
As Renewed Hope has grown, they have received an increasing number of receivers reaching back out to them seeking additional support.
“A lot of the people after they leave here, they don’t know where else to go or what to do,” Lincoln said. “I know situations where people, because of the inability and maybe lack of knowledge to communicate, they couldn’t get a job.”
Radcliffe added, “Sometimes just saying, ‘Here, go here, do this,’ is too overwhelming for them. We’ve said before how we really need a social worker to walk alongside them after. That’s one area that we have room to improve.”
But as a non-profit, volunteer-based organization, providing additional social services is difficult. In the meantime, Renewed Hope is looking for more Spanish-speaking volunteers for their team.
“[As volunteers] we are gonna go home tired and dirty,” Radcliffe said. “Cuts and bruises sometimes, yes, but we always go home fulfilled because we always have interactions with people that we never would have.”
