About Us

Our mission is to provide food, clothing, shelter and supportive services to our neighbors in need.

Our vision is to be a faith-based service organization recognized for excellence in serving the emergency needs of poor people. Based on shared religious principles, we strive to create a welcoming, caring, and compassionate environment that affirms the dignity of our guests, donors, volunteers, and staff.

History

In the early 1980s, a number of religious leaders in Durham came together to coordinate emergency services for the poor in downtown. The result of that effort was the establishment of a new non-profit organization, Urban Ministries of Durham, Inc. in 1983 and the construction of the Urban Ministries Center. The Center opened in 1985. UMD became the landlord for several existing downtown ministries including: the St. Philip's Community Kitchen, Meals on Wheels, the United Methodist Mission Society, Women in Action, and the Presbyterian Urban Ministry. Strictly a landlord, UMD never engaged in ministry development of its own. A few years later, two community shelters were opened with the men housed on the Urban Ministries Center floor and women with children housed in the old Social Security Administration building (owned by the County) next door. In the early 1990s, the two shelters merged and moved both operations into the county-owned building. Later in that decade, both Meals on Wheels and the Presbyterian Urban Ministry moved out of the Urban Ministries Center because they needed larger, more suitable spaces.

Most of the original tenants of the Urban Ministries Center were formed out of particular faith traditions or by a dedicated group of people who saw a need in the community and responded to that need by forming a new, independent organization. This multiplicity of origins was a mixed blessing... The "good news" was clearly manifest in the tireless and focused work that each organization performed to serve the neediest people in our community. The "not so good news" was that, because each organization had operated independently, with separate boards, staff, and sources of financial support, we had failed to capture some potential synergies. We sometime duplicated services and did not use volunteers effectively. The vision of those leaders of twenty years ago to bring together different faith traditions to make common cause in serving the poor was never fully realized.

At the turn of the millennium, a new generation of leaders seized the opportunity to fulfill the original vision of the Urban Ministries Center. Believing that the time was right for their organizations to merge, the Community Shelter for HOPE, the St. Philip's Community Kitchen, and the United Methodist Mission Society, merged into Urban Ministries of Durham, Inc. on July 1, 2001. Now that vision of different faiths working shoulder-to-shoulder to serve the poor in downtown Durham is being reclaimed through Urban Ministries of Durham.