Once upon a time, in a poor community along Virginia's Eastern Shore, a teenager working on a high school service project gathered five young children from her Spanish-speaking neighborhood for afternoon tutoring sessions at a nearby United Methodist church.
As the students' academic skills improved, word of the program spread among Accomack County's Latino parents, many of them immigrants who had struggled to help their children with English, math and other school assignments. Within a few years, the once-tiny service project had blossomed into a full-blown regional ministry.
The ministry, called Una Familia, offers help to 130 elementary-through-high school-age students at five area churches, a small scholarship program, and advocacy and translation services for families.
Its leadership now wants to help even more people by addressing the need for affordable housing and by expanding into a neighboring county.
With these ambitious goals in mind, several of Una Familia's team members attended a pilot program called Ministry Accelerator in January 2017.
Sponsored by the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church, the
Ministry Accelerator is a model, borrowed from the business world, that was designed to introduce ministries to the principles and skills that help spur growth.
Accelerators are similar to incubators, but they focus on growing established organizations rather than launching new ones.
