Welcome to The Center for Urban
Missions, a faith-based, non-profit corporation with a mission to
“equip and inspire urban families to move from a life of dependency
to a life of true sufficiency.” We are committed to the whole
person, the whole family, permanent change, partnerships,
accountability and integrity, excellence and high standards.
We started in 1986, initially focusing
much of our attention on the families in the Metropolitan Gardens,
the largest public housing community in Birmingham, AL. Situated in
what was called the nation’s poorest zip code at the time,
Metropolitan Gardens was described as a “distressed neighborhood”
and, like other inner-city neighborhoods, was characterized by
single parenthood, youth, poverty, high unemployment, and public
assistance.
Today those projects are gone, replaced
by a mixed-income community called Park Place. Now, public housing
residents live next to renters who are paying considerably more to
live in Downtown, which is experiencing a revival with a surge of
high-end lofts and other revitalization projects totaling more than
$350 million. However, problems persist in the underserved
communities that we target.
