Community Empowerment and Social Change

The Community Empowerment ministry of Back Bay Mission serves the local and wider communities and initiates fundamental systemic change through grassroots community organizing and advocacy.

For more than 80 years, Back Bay Mission has worked on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to assist those who have been marginalized by their poverty, race, lack of education or other life circumstances. The Mission has developed a proven model of community organizing and change as it birthed 10 new human service agencies, nurtured them to maturity, then spun them off as independent entities that continue to flourish and serve in extraordinary ways. Those agencies include

• Harrison County Head Start                
• Gulf Coast Women’s Center
• Mississippi Coast Interfaith Disaster Task Force
• Interfaith Hospitality Network
• Gulf Coast Family Counseling
• Loaves & Fishes Soup Kitchen
• South Mississippi AIDS Task Force, Inc.
• Biloxi Cooperative Church Ministry
• Open Doors Homeless Coalition

Today’s priority is moving the Mission’s community development and advocacy commitments forward.
Among the top issues are homelessness, affordable housing and the establishment by the Mississippi Legislature of a statewide Housing Fund. Dena Wittmann, Ph.D.,is Back Bay Mission’s Community Empowerment Associate.

Homelessness has been addressed by creating a permanent housing and outreach program (Home at Last) at Back Bay Mission, and by working with other community stakeholders to develop the Open Doors Homeless Coalition of South Mississippi, which is responsible for bringing in approximately $1.8 million in new funding to deal with the homeless issue.

In an effort to dispel negative myths about affordable housing – NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard), Back Bay Mission is conducting a public awareness campaign, Warm Welcome Gulf Coast: Because Hospitality is More than just a Slogan. (www.warmwelcomegulfcoast.org)