About the project

Mission Grounds was set up to help the homeless children and orphans. It generates money to help these children through the sales of a great coffee. It uses all the profits to help children, none of the volunteers receive a salary nor is there very little overhead. Hence 100 percent of the profits are donated to help. Over the past 2 years Mission Grounds has been helping orphans in China, Russia, Africa and Venezuela. MG has also been helping homeless children around metro Atlanta through the donations of food, clothes, coats, shoes, books and book bags. Mission Grounds has sponsored many neighborhood collection drives for clothes, shoes and books and also through a large back to school drive sponsored by Kroger Grocery Stores.

Through providing for the short term needs of these children we have realized it could be very beneficial to provide for the long terms needs of the homeless children's families and in particular for their mothers. Since there seems to be a large focus already on their housing needs we thought it best to focus on the other needed long term remedy - employment. Our goal is to provide a program that teaches the single moms a trade "cooking" or basic office computer skills- so they can acquire a new job and to supplement this trade training with the basic life skills training so that they are able to maintain their new employment. So our program will not only teach them the training to get the job but also provide the support and training to keep the job. We plan on a minimum one year follow -up to be sure our candidates are successful. We plan on providing both a classroom and computer center to aid us in providing these life skill lessons and provide career counseling and also to provide the technology and communications that are so vital in procuring and maintaining employment in today's world. Once the students are employed we will provide the counseling and support to make sure they remain employed.

The other exciting aspect of the cooking school will be that the food byproducts of the training will be used to feed and support many of the neighboring homeless shelters. The students will be able to practice their trade and at the same time feed many hundreds of homeless families and children. We eventually hope to start a catering business and set up cooking lessons with celebrity chefs and high profile chefs for the general public as means to help support the cooking school.