Flourish Church opens in Gary to build relationships between nonprofits, community stakeholders
In 2022, a 20,000-square-foot building and 3 acres of property that was once Grace Baptist Church in Gary was donated to Dexter Harris.
Harris opened what is now known as Flourish Church near Ridge Road and Cleveland Street in Gary.
But he wanted to do more than just open a church. His desire was to bring together other Gary-based organizations to address some of the city’s pressing needs.
“I really just began to dream about what it would look like for us to be a church that lived outside our four walls,” said Harris, who is senior pastor of Flourish Church.
In fall 2023, Harris decided to establish Flourish Community Hub, a nonprofit mission that is separate from the church.
“As we began to do research in the city of Gary, one of the things I noticed was that there was a lot of boots on the ground, organizations trying to do a lot of good things to transform the community and bring it into a better quality of life,” said Harris, a 37-year-old native of Chicago. “But a lot of these organizations were also working in silos.”
Harris’ plan was to bring these organizations together to address social issues, including unemployment.
“We thought about how we could use our building to really pull these organizations together to create a community hub that would collaborate around social issues,” Harris said. “Over the past year and a half, we now have over 25 different partners who all offer various things. It’s almost like a puzzle. We always say everybody plays a part of the puzzle.”
Some of the programs offered at the Flourish Community Hub:
- A youth mentorship program provides people ages 13 to 21 with weekly opportunities to build meaningful connections and develop their personal and professional skills. It’s a partnership with the Gary-Merrillville Salvation Army
- Preschool and after-school program for children with autism in partnership with We Are the Village
- Adult education for young adults by Neighbors’ Educational Opportunities (NEO) provides adult and secondary educational opportunities
- Youth addiction recovery program sponsored by SHINE Recovery Cafe
- Community resource pantry, sponsored by HealthVisions Midwest
“We run our own youth mentorship with young Black males,” Harris said. “We bring in entrepreneurs throughout Northwest Indiana to introduce them to different career paths.”
There is also a partnership with the Indiana Department of Child Services to provide clothing and basic school resources to foster children using a secure system.
If that’s not enough, the hub partnered with the city of Gary to create a lawn care service that hires young people to provide lawn maintenance for senior citizens and others who may need it.
“It’s not us doing it alone. It’s collaborating, it’s partnership,” Harris said. “It’s really the community lifting it all together.”
Although not a native of Gary, Harris arrived in 2014 with his wife and three children.
“I feel God called me to the city of Gary. I just really grew a heart and love for the city,” Harris said, who serves as executive director of the hub. “I saw the potential, and I saw the brightness within our community and just really began to dream about what it would look like for us to pull our collective effort together.
“I feel like Gary is in a place now where I think everyone’s hungry, people being more willing to collaborate just to work with one another.”
Raydia Martin, associate director at Flourish Community Hub, said she was pleasantly surprised to see the willingness of other nonprofits to work together.
“Partnership and collaboration (are) hard to find in the nonprofit sector. It tends to be very siloed and very competitive,” Martin said. “I was very surprised how easy it was to partner with other nonprofits to launch the hub.”
Martin wants to help Harris expand the hub to other parts of Gary and Northwest Indiana.
“I definitely see (the hub) expanding outside of the social service sector into more of a community redevelopment sector,” Martin said. “We have plans to help people build small businesses. We want to create an affordable housing initiative.”
She said those plans will unfold in the next couple of years.
“We will be a model that is not just a prototype for social services but one for affecting redevelopment on a mass scale,” she said. “Our goal is to replicate ourselves around the Region.”
Harris knows that, with so many issues facing the city, others might feel overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible task of renewing depressed areas.
“But what I think that we tapped into is the power of collaboration,” Harris said. “We put our logos and egos to the side. We looked at collaboration over competition and began to lock arms with our neighbors. I feel we have more resources than we realize when we actually depend on one another.” •
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