Grace Covenant
Alternative Gift Giving Guide 2018
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If you are looking for a way to give a gift that keeps on giving
and that directly impacts our Ministry Partners,
Reclaiming Christmas is a great way to do both.
We have community partners in Asheville, Guatemala and Haiti. Click on a link to make an online donation directly to the nonprofit of your choice. If you would like to make your donation in memory or in honor of someone this holiday season, you can get a card indicating your gift from Anna Louise in the main office or after 10:30 worship on Sundays in the narthex during Advent season.
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Click on the organization's name (in purple) to be directed to their website.
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Children and Youth
Asheville City Schools Foundation
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Implements bold strategies, funds big ideas and engages the community to increase excellence with equity for all children in our schools.
Asheville Writers in the Schools and Community
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Creates spaces for young people of color to express themselves creatively through creative writing and the arts. Programs include "Word on the Street," a bilingual arts and culture magazine for and by youth; Family Voices, a family writing program, and residencies by local Artist Mentors.
Asheville Youth Mission
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Plans and leads day, weekend and week-long mission immersion experiences with middle-school and high-school youth.
Creative Peacemakers
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Offers an after school program at no cost to students living in the Deaverview Apartment Community/Johnston Elementary School.
Read to Succeed Asheville
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Works with public schools to narrow the achievement gap between middle-class students and those from low-income/low-literacy homes.
Serve to LEAD
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Unites young people from different social and cultural backgrounds around a common vision to serve their local and global community to reduce poverty: spiritually, socially, and materially.
YTL Training Programs
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Supports disenfranchised communities as they strive to succeed in an inequitable system. Working as educators, mentors, advocates, and neighbors, creates bridges for children and families to overcome the current gaps of disparity; guards the rights of children and their families; and ensures all community members are informed of those rights.
Environmental Justice
Creation Care Alliance of WNC
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Interfaith network which strives to be a voice for God’s creation and neighbors harmed by environmental injustices, and to bring practical and hopeful solutions through inspiration, education, service and advocacy.
Food Security
Asheville Poverty Initiative
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Fosters relationships among people of all economic means, thereby building community through the Poverty Scholars Program and 12 Baskets Café.
Bountiful Cities
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Partners with community groups to create urban agricultural spaces, teach sustainable agriculture skills, and promote social justice and economic sustainability. Coordinates the Asheville Buncombe Community Garden Network of 30+ gardens, introduces youth to gardening in summer and after school programs, offers cooking and garden education, and runs a sustainable landscape company.
Food Connection
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Collects surplus food from Asheville, Black Mountain & Swannanoa restaurants, caterers and institutions and delivers the food to those who will enjoy it in order to reduce food waste and ease the pain of immediate hunger.
Grace Covenant Community Garden
is a three-season garden tended by vested volunteer gardeners from Grace Covenant and the community. About 75% of the vegetables produced are donated to organizations that serve our neighbors having difficulty affording fresh vegetables and needing better nutrition. In addition to the church campus garden the gardeners grow potatoes and cabbage at Jasperwood Farm in Leicester with Anthony Cole’s Family.
(Send a check to Grace Covenant with “Community Garden” in subject line)
Health
Heart of Horse Sense
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Provides free therapeutic horsemanship, including equine-assisted psychotherapy and learning, for veterans, their families, and at-risk youth.
Steady Collective
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Promotes the wellness of people who use drugs through empowerment and respectful collaboration. Steady Collective’s goal is to improve overall community health by reducing the rate of drug overdose and the spread of infectious disease with education, advocacy, and direct service.
Housing and Homelessness
Habitat for Humanity
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Works with volunteers, community members and families to build and repair homes. Habitat envisions a world where everyone has a decent place to live because strong and stable homes help build strong and stable communities.
Homeward Bound
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Serving individuals and families in Asheville and Buncombe County while they are homeless and ending their homelessness with housing.
Veterans Restoration Quarters/ABCCM
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Cooks and serves residents a meal; an average of 200 veterans is served. Volunteers join the VRQ residents at their table, eating and talking together.
Immigrant and Latinx Community
JMPROTV
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Produces live programs, reports, cultural notes, and interviews about issues affecting our community (such as racial equity, immigration, education, health, etc.). Topics are reported from the perspective of the people impacted, and stories are shared through social networks.
Latino Advocacy Coalition
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Creates a safe, inclusive, and equitable community for the Latinx population in Henderson County and surrounding areas through structural transformation, advocacy, and community empowerment.
Nuestro Centro
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A community center in the Emma Community of Buncombe County. Nuestro Centro listens to directly affected people in order to identify root causes of problems in the community, organizes to confront problems, and seeks justice while strengthening identity and culture.
Western North Carolina Sanctuary Movement
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A multi-faceted coalition of community and faith leaders within and without the Latinx community which works to create a space of refuge for targeted communities such as black and brown bodies, immigrants, the LGBTQ community and the Latinx community through protection, education, active resistance, resilience, resources, critical thinking, healing, contemplative action and transformation.
WNC Workers’ Center
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Builds power among low-wage immigrant workers through organizing and education to resolve issues of labor rights and promote fair working conditions in Western North Carolina.
International Ministry
Guatemala Mission
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A covenant partnership between GCPC and Iglesia Jerusalem Presbyterian Church in Coatepeque, Guatemala which began in 1994 which provides scholarships to students who attend schools in the Coatepeque area.
(Send a check to Grace Covenant with “Guatemala” in subject line)
Healing Art Missions
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Supports the people of Haiti in the areas of health, nutrition, education, housing and social justice.
Mark & Jenny Bent/Hare's Mission Work in the Dominican Republic and Haiti
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Mark and Jenny work with sugarcane communities to help health clinics train health-care leaders, and in the DR and Haiti work with small family farmers to improve food production from their gardens.
(Send a check to Grace Covenant with “Mark Hare” in subject line)
Job Creation
Gentle Mothering/Cuidados Maternales
: Provides support to low-income women and Latinx families during childbirth by providing affordable childbirth classes and birth and postpartum services in Western North Carolina and the surrounding areas. Their Spanish-language Spanish/bilingual doula training programs provide doulas with all of the resources necessary to develop a rewarding career and contribute to a growing Latinx job market.
Green Opportunities
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Trains, supports, and connects people from marginalized communities to sustainable employment pathways. Green Opportunities envisions resilient, interconnected communities, where everyone shares respect and dignity, has the opportunity to build wealth, and is dedicated to helping each other thrive.
Justice and Community Building
BeLoved Asheville
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Builds community to embody and create justice, equity and love. BeLoved builds relationships across old lines of division through sharing, justice-seeking and using our imaginations to create a new world.
Center for Participatory Change
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Creates spaces for learning, healing and relationship building through Popular Education, Language Justice, Racial Equity and Sustainability Circles.
CoThinkk
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A giving circle that addresses education, economic mobility/opportunity and leadership development towards impacting some of the most critical social issues facing African American and Latinx communities.
Hands & Feet
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Year-long progressive, ecumenical Christian service program for young adults to pursue their passions, serve others, live in intentional community and explore faith.
Haywood Street Congregation
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A transformative open community of Christ, led by the Holy Spirit, creating opportunities to serve and be served so that each person is empowered to claim their identity as a child of God.
Hood Huggers
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Builds greater communication, connection and wealthy in systematically marginalized neighborhoods in the Affrilachian region through the arts, environment, social enterprise. Hood Huggers offers sustainable strategies for building support pillars for resilient historically African American neighborhoods.
Johnson C. Smith Seminary
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Historically Black seminary of the Presbyterian Church (USA) which provides innovative theological education and ministerial formation opportunities for ordained and non-ordained persons to advance communities of faith, justice, and compassion.
Pisgah Legal Services
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Pursues justice by providing legal assistance and advocacy to help low-income people in Western North Carolina meet their basic needs and improve their lives.
Residents’ Council of Asheville Housing Authority
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Council led by committed, dedicated and engaged members of the public housing community which serves as the primary vehicle for helping residents improve their economic, educational, social, employment and entrepreneurial status as a means of moving out of poverty.
SOS: What They Don’t Teach You
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Builds connections to high-income career pathways and high-wealth strategic tactics for long-term generational legacy building.
(Designate gift to Bountiful Cities to SOS: What They Don’t Teach You.)
Working Wheels
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Repairs and recycles donated cars, transforming them into working wheels for working families. Funds will purchase tools and equipment that will increase the functionality and organization of the garage. This will enable us to attract more volunteers and increase the number of donated cars that we can successfully repair and match with families who need them.
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Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church
789 Merrimon Ave., Asheville, NC 28804
828.254.3274
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