Gospel Con Carne

This week at Mobile Loaves & Fishes is all about celebrating our volunteers, and the Gospel Con Carne podcast is no different! Alan's guest, Noble Doss, has been volunteering with MLF for more than three years in our Community Market. Our Community First! Village neighbors visit the on-site market daily for basic necessities, and also treat it as a gathering spot with other neighbors and visitors....

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, our guest on this week's Gospel Con Carne, Brian Bell, recalls traveling back to what was left of his damaged home to gather his belongings and set off on a new path in life. He headed to Austin, Texas with hopes of starting over, but the loss of his job along with a deep depression which halted his motivation left Brian in an unexpected state of ho...

At Mobile Loaves & Fishes, we believe that the single greatest cause of homelessness is a profound, catastrophic loss of family. This week's guest on the Gospel Con Carne podcast, Letty, experienced not the physical loss of her family, but the loss of having no one to love and care for her. Being told from a young age that she wasn't supposed to be born, and bullied by peers and family her entire...

Community First! Village is a place where men and women from different walks of life find restoration and healing, and our Missional neighbors play a vital role in this process through intentional relationship building. Christina Hite and her husband, Dustin, have been living in the Village missionally for almost a year. Although they've never personally experienced homelessness, the Hites have a...

As a budding songwriter in Nashville more than 30 years ago, our guest on this week's podcast, Vernon, once felt like he had it all. He wrote songs for Keith Urban and also had several other number one hits on the country music charts. And then, things changed. When friends in the music industry started disappearing and checks started getting smaller, Vernon entered a decades-long downward spiral...

As a missional neighbor in Community First! Village, this week's guest on the Gospel Con Carne podcast, Lori Nava, lives and serves alongside our neighbors coming out of chronic homelessness. In this episode, Lori shares her personal experience with the loss of a relationship with her father and the empathy this has given her for the many traumas our formerly homeless neighbors living in the Villa...

After thinking she had lost every family member she had ever known and loved, everything changed when this week's guest on the Gospel Con Carne podcast, Leatha, received a Facebook message from a man saying he was her father. For more than a decade, Leatha thought her father was dead, and she had been alone. After living on the streets for almost four years, Leatha's father, Gary, helped her move...

Many of the men and women we serve at Mobile Loaves & Fishes, whether living on the streets or in Community First! Village, suffer from mental health illnesses. This week on the Gospel Con Carne podcast, Alan has a conversation with Chris Roubieu, the program manager at Integral Care who works directly with our formerly homeless neighbors in the Village who struggle with mental health disorders. D...

On this week's episode of the Gospel Con Carne podcast, Alan is joined by Community First! Village's first formerly homeless resident, Sam. In 2005, Mobile Loaves & Fishes lifted Sam up off the streets of Austin and moved him into what was our first RV through our Community First! program -- at the time referred to as 'Habitat on Wheels.' Now, 16 years later, Sam is living in the Village where he...

As the current dialogue around homelessness in Austin continues to intensify, Mark Hilbelink, lead pastor of Sunrise Community Church in Austin, joins Alan on this week's episode of the Gospel Con Carne podcast for a hope-filled conversation around serving our friends who are struggling to survive on the streets. On a daily basis, Sunrise Community Church welcomes and serves many men and women who...

We are so excited to kick off season four of the Gospel Con Carne podcast with our well-known Community First! Village neighbor, Billy "Shorty" Joe—a man who carries quite a large presence around the neighborhood. No stranger to the streets, Shorty spent more than 30 years homeless in Austin before making his way home to the Village in November 2016. Although he was homeless himself, Shorty spent...

We're excited to wrap up this season of the Gospel Con Carne podcast with our friend Chris Baker, founder of The Other Ones Foundation. In the midst of Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week, this conversation between two guys who have been serving men and women living on the streets of Austin for many years comes down to a simple approach toward healing the broken—just loving on people. Hear Chri...

This week's Gospel Con Carne guest, D'Juan Davis, has learned a lot about leading and serving over the course of his life. He also exudes these two qualities every day as a member of Mobile Loaves & Fishes' culinary team in Community First! Village. Over the past several months, the culinary team has stepped up for their fellow neighbors by cooking and preparing fresh lunches daily. On the outside...

We're celebrating volunteers this week at Mobile Loaves & Fishes, and our guest in this Gospel Con Carne episode is among the longest-serving volunteers to bless our organization! Host Alan Graham often talks about the powerful impact of an individual's halo in helping to grow Mobile Loaves & Fishes into the organization it has become since its founding 22 years ago. Mary Lou Batlan and her husban...

It's always hard to say goodbye to a dear friend and neighbor in Community First! Village. This week's Gospel Con Carne guest, Cheryl Williams, has been part of the Mobile Loaves & Fishes family for more than four years. She moved to the Village after several years of being homeless, and is moving at the end of this month after having been re-connected to her family. While we are saddened to see C...

From a brief time living in Kenya to working on projects in impoverished areas of Louisiana, Sarah Satterlee gained a firsthand understanding of the value of built environments that bring diverse individuals together. She also has a firsthand understanding of Community First! Village, now a 51-acre development in northeast Austin designed specifically for men and women coming out of chronic homele...

After living in Venezuela for three years as a teenager, this week's Gospel Con Carne guest Melissa Nicewarner Daly says she came back to the U.S. with a newfound level of awareness. Melissa has always had a passion for justice and building community, with a driving force of bringing people together and lifting people up. Realizing that there is no clear cut path for mitigating homelessness, Melis...

There's a hot August day back in 2013 that is chiseled into the memory of Alan Graham and his guest on this episode of the Gospel Con Carne, Ed Lundin. During a hearing before the Travis County Commissioner's Court on August 13, 2013, Mobile Loaves & Fishes received its first site development permit for Community First! Village. At the time, Ed was volunteering at a local church while following hi...

Sherywnn Patton and Gospel Con Carne host Alan Graham are two men with vastly different upbringings and backgrounds, yet in recent years have found themselves collaborating in their work with a common goal in mind—bringing healing, dignity and reconciliation to men and women who need it most through the lens of the Gospel. In this episode, Sherwynn and Alan, along with guest host Amber Fogarty, un...

When Chad Zunker's NFL dreams were crushed by an All-American safety early in his college playing days at The University of Texas, he knew nothing of the journey that awaited him. In the years ahead, Chad's ambition turned to writing. Manuscript after manuscript led to a pile of rejection letters (he stopped counting after 1000), yet there remained a persistent nudging on his heart that told him t...

As our country continues to navigate a health crisis of unprecedented proportions, Gospel Con Carne host Alan Graham takes you back nearly 15 years to another significant event that drew Mobile Loaves & Fishes onto the front lines of a different kind of unprecedented disaster. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in August of 2005, MLF was still a young organization with only a few food truck...

As an only child growing up with divorced parents, Jessica Mitchell says her upbringing in Topeka, Kansas was normal by all accounts. Her journey to where she is today in Austin, Texas, however, isn't quite as straightforward. Jessica is a missional resident living in Community First! Village where she lives alongside and serves men and women who are coming out of chronic homelessness. Gospel Con...

Gospel Con Carne host Alan Graham always loves to say that "behind every great woman, there's just a man." This is your opportunity to meet that great woman in Alan's life, his wife Tricia Graham, who has faithfully been by his side for nearly four decades. Tricia is the Director of Resident Care for Mobile Loaves & Fishes, and oversees the organization's daily engagement with the formerly homeles...

Everything we do at Mobile Loaves & Fishes is about relationships and connecting with other individuals human to human, heart to heart. So as you can imagine, in this unprecedented time of social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our organization faces a challenging dynamic as we seek to continue growing community and building relationships with our friends who have experienced homelessness...

With a personal understanding of what it feels like to be seen, Susan McDowell, CEO of LifeWorks Austin, has made it a top priority for Austin's youth experiencing homelessness to be seen and heard as they navigate their way to self-sufficiency. With similar values to Mobile Loaves & Fishes, LifeWorks Austin focuses on the relational needs of individuals experiencing homelessness and instilling di...