Financial Plus Credit Union is pleased to announce they have raised a gross of $77,739 from their 2015 Pink Night fundraising efforts. A net total of $69,300, will be donated to American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer. The 9th annual “Pink Night” event was held Thursday, October 1st, 2015 in downtown Flint at Blackstone’s Pub & Grill, 531 S. Saginaw St., Flint, MI.

They are not only cute little kittens; they are kittens that nobody wanted. Some of them have behavioral issues or medical problems, a missing eye or limb. Some are in their senior years and others have suffered injuries. These are the animals that are taken in by Lucky Day Animal Rescue in Grand Blanc.

Photography provided by the Universal Kidney Foundation

For most of his 17 years, Undray Lewis has not had a normal childhood. He was in and out of foster homes in the Detroit area since he was a tiny baby, found by authorities at a meth lab. As he grew up, the families who fostered him lacked the time, patience and resources to manage his severe behavioral problems, including oppositional defiance and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; these foster families were not able to call him their own. As a teen, he lived at a residential boys’ home through Wolverine Human Services, staying on campus and following strict routines.

For many of the retired volunteers who arrive at Riverside Tabernacle in Downtown Flint early every Monday morning to sort and pack food for people in need, reaching retirement age gave them new choices. With so many ways they could choose to commit their time, they each decided to come to Riverside Tabernacle to help put food on the tables of many Flint residents. “My belief is you don’t retire and sit in a chair,” says Sue Jeffes, who retired after working 21 years as a nurse for McLaren Cancer Institute and now helps organize and assist the volunteers at The Storehouse each week. “I’m here to serve others and not myself.”

“The warming center began pretty haphazardly,” Vicky remembered. “In the winter of 2010, I looked out my window at our sandwich giveaway station across the street and noticed a crowd on the tiny porch despite the bitter temperature. They were not leaving with their sandwiches, but instead were choosing to eat them right there!” Concerned for the safety of these vulnerable people, Vicky remembered the old cafeteria in the basement of the Center for Hope. “I called our facilities manager and asked him to move the sandwich program down there so that people could eat inside. I had no intention of creating a 24-hour warming center.” But that’s just what she’d done. Vicky says that the staff was soon calling her to say that people didn’t want to leave. “We extended our hours until, about two weeks after I’d made this change, the basement was open all day and night with an hour hiatus for cleaning.”

Inside the main atrium at Genesys, window displays filled with twinkling lights and sparkling ornaments invite visitors into the Acorn Gift & Flower Shop, where a carefully curated selection of porcelain angels, smiling snowmen and fuzzy moose beg to be taken home for the holidays. “We choose the merchandise ourselves,” said Store Manager Karen Badgley. “It’s always a treat to shop for our holiday offerings, especially when our selections become popular and sell out!” Karen says she’s worked in retail for years, but she’s never worked anywhere like this. “Our store is staffed by volunteers, and it is such a great place to work. The volunteers are just fabulous,” she said.

Judge Duncan M. Beagle is known throughout the community as a caring and generous man. As a Genesee County Circuit Court judge, he has sat through many cases in which people were struggling and hurting, especially during the holidays. He heard about the Saginaw County Bar Association’s dinner, so he sent then-GCBA president Brian Barkey and Tom Pabst, GCBA vice president at the time, to Saginaw to get ideas for starting a holiday dinner in Genesee County. “It was there that the dream of Flint’s Holiday Dinner was born,” Brian remembers. “Judge Beagle has the biggest heart!”

The GRO Pod is an intense spiritual and life skills class designed to immerse inmates in biblical knowledge and teach them life skills to stop the cycle of recidivism. It is one of the many programs sustained by Forgotten Man Ministries. FMM is a missionary team dedicated to witnessing to inmates in order to change the trajectory of their lives. Everything they do, from Friday night worship services and special ministries such as Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, to correspondence courses, individual counseling and even the book cart of reading material, is designed to lead people closer to God. But their efforts don’t end there. “When we see the Lord’s instruction to make disciples of all nations,” Novak explained, “we know it doesn’t just mean leading people to Christ. We need to help them grow up and mature in the Spirit. Everything we do works to that end. The GRO Pod is one of our most effective efforts simply because of the amount of time we have to disciple those students.” Chaplain Al is referring to the extensive length of the class: 200 hours of instruction in ten weeks. “Two things tend to happen when a person goes to prison,” the chaplain said. “Either they become further involved in crime, or they change and never return. We are trying to delete people from the system: to change them so they never return.” This is not just rhetoric. Statistics from the GRO Pod program in the Kent County Jail indicate that recidivism rates dropped from 76% to 25%.