New Look

This year we celebrate 70 years of hope, shelter, and transformation. Over these last 7 decades we have been blessed to be a part of thousands of stories of transformation. Bonds have been broken, families have been restored, and Jesus has been made known.

In 2019, we moved into our new location at the Center of Opportunity and our model of care shifted to a much more comprehensive model. Through collaboration and partnership with over 40 community partners, we provide everything a person needs to move forward on their journey from homeless to wholeness.

Because of this shift, we felt our logo and branding needed a new, fresh look and feel.

Our New Logo

Our New Logo

Though it is made up of multiple pieces, the pieces come together to complete a circle - representing wholeness. The individual pieces represent the various facets of the journey, as well as our 4 core values:

  • Love
  • Grace
  • Dignity
  • Respect

Every person who comes to GRM is unique and their needs are unique. They may struggle with addiction, mental illness, unemployment, and/or lack of affordable housing. Or they might be in need of legal assistance, or job skills training. In order to help them, multiple pieces need to be brought together so they can journey out of homelessness toward wholeness and transformation. Our care is driven by our 4 core principles, which are forever represented in our new logo.

In the center of the logo is a cross, because Jesus is the center of everything we do. Apart from Him, there is no lasting transformation. So, while we serve all people, regardless of faith, Jesus is in everything we do. Every person we help is given the opportunity to know and pursue Jesus with their mind, body, and spirit.

Our Tagline

Homeless to wholeness

Our goal for every person we help is wholeness. Wholeness for us means that we help everyone who walks through our doors with the resources they need to address the issues that caused them to be homeless to begin with. Then we help treat those issues and then healing begins to happen and the chains that have bound them begin to break. As a faith-based organization, we also believe that complete wholeness happens when they accept Christ, who fills the void, and they no longer walk in their old ways.

God is a God of wholeness. He takes the broken and makes them new. He redeems, He restores, and He renews.

This message is people-focused. This is why you will almost always see this tagline alongside an image of a person who has been through or is currently in our program. We see the transformation, and hear their stories because our legacy is not a building, nor our branding, our legacy is the people we serve and their stories of transformation.

We want to be intentional about sharing their stories through social media, in our podcasts, and in our correspondence because it brings hope and expands the message of the Gospel across our community, and our nation. We are living in a time of great darkness and hopelessness and we want the work we do to shine a light on Jesus who brings hope to the hopeless and sets the captives free.

70th

Our 70th Anniversary Tagline and Branding

Primary: Celebrating 70 years of miraculous transformations.

Secondary: A legacy of wholeness.

70 years is deeply symbolic in Judeo-Christian culture. 70 years is a generation and it is symbolic of wholeness, a legacy, and the real thing.

When an individual journeys from homeless to wholeness, the impact of their transformation goes beyond just them. Their entire world is impacted - their friends and family. Their transformation is of eternal significance, and their legacy is forever changed.

1955Our legacy over the past 70 years has been one defined by hope, shelter, and transformation. Throughout 2023, we want to remind you of that legacy - that we have been faithful in our mission to care for the homeless in our community, and to share the love and hope that can only be found in Jesus.

Our Future

When we were founded in 1953, the services were described as “Soup, Soap, and Salvation” to the homeless men who were riding the rails (referred to as “hobos” in those days). The work we did was important, but the homeless population was very different than it is now.

Homelessness has become vastly more complex because of a rising addiction epidemic and because we better understand how mental illness, addiction, and lack of resources perpetuates the chronic cycle of homelessness.

We used to only serve men because men made up nearly all the homeless population in those days. We began serving women in 1992, and though we were able to serve single mothers and children, we were never able to serve single fathers and their children, or families.

We are now serving individuals, families, single fathers, and single mothers. We are serving more children than we ever dreamed of serving as we are one of very few shelters with the capacity and safety protocols to do so.

God provided in advance of our need by providing the Center of Opportunity, and we have followed His calling to faithfully serve those He has entrusted to us.

We have also shifted to addressing poverty through our community programs because we want to be involved before a family or individual becomes homeless.

As we move into the next 70 years of providing hope, shelter, and transformation, we want to continue to be firm in our values and how we serve. We are committed to keeping Jesus at the center of what we do - that will never change.

But we want to be agile in addressing the needs of those we serve, recognizing the issue is complex and will continue to shift over time, just as we have seen over the past 70 years. We don’t want to be so stuck in our ways and dogmatic in our approach that we miss the opportunity to help people. Had we held fast to our original mission, we would never have expanded to serve women in 1992, or further expanded to serve families beginning in 2019. So while we remain steadfast in our closely held values and beliefs, we want to be open to the opportunities that come to us and we want to be committed to innovative ways to serving our hungry and hurting neighbors.