By Todd Pile, Executive Account Manager, Roland Digital Media

I work for Dave Roland and his great team at Roland Digital Media in Tennessee. There is a ministry that our company is involved in that I would like tell you about, and about a sudden need for this program.

Next Step for Life House Before Tornado

Next Step for Life, Inc. is a one year, transitional housing program started by Dave and Diane Rowland that is changing our community, one life at a time. It’s vision is to empower adults who have become dysfunctional in life through modeling Christ to fulfill their purpose.  It does this by providing young adults transitional living with an intact structure and encouraging spiritual, emotional, and physical growth. In addition to classes, which teach life skills, residents learn by living it out daily in the home with staff and many volunteers who share their own experiences with them.

Dave Roland spoke at the alternative school in the area. As he spoke to these kids, he realized that that the total number of “bad kids” in this school was NONE. These were merely kids that didn’t have the parental guides that we all did, bailing us out of a bad situation, or help us understand right from wrong. These children’s only crime in life was a lack of leadership by their parents, and thus were a product of their own environment, caught in a system designed to make them feel worthless, and unappreciated. Dave wondered if he hadn’t had the same structure from his family that raised him, would he have easily become one of these kids as well?

Next Step for Life House After Tornado

On the early morning of March 3,  the tornado came that left a path of destruction for 52 MILES across Tennessee, from Nashville to Cookeville.  The tail of the tornado, slammed into our girls home, ripping part of the roof off the house, and destroying a back living room wall. A French door on the back of the house was ripped off, flung through the air, and was impaled in the top of a tree in the FRONT yard of the property. Luckily all of the residents of the home remained safe, and were evacuated that night to a local church. As the new day dawned, workers began pouring in, removing all the contents of the home, salvaging everything not damaged by debris or water. In two days, teams cleared the home of all furniture, and the remains of the roof and damage wall was removed.

Which is why I’m writing this. We need your help!

We have been blessed in the arrangements for girls to stay in a local fraternity home, while the students are away for the summer, so they have a new temporary residence, while decisions on how to move forward with the home begins. But like any recovery effort, the home will be covered by insurance, but replacing personal items (cloths, hygiene products, etc.) are not counted in the cost of loss, and with several residents in the program, this can get expensive.

We humbly ask for donations to assist with restoring these girls’ lives back to a normalcy, critical to their success in the program. From a simple dollar to help buy toothpaste, to hundreds of dollars to help fund the yearly expense of the program, every bit counts, especially now.

Please join Insider in donating funds to help rebuild the Next Step for Life house  after the storm.  You can donate to the storm recovery efforts via Next Step For Life’s Securegive Portal.

If you would like to know more about the program visit the Nextstep website.

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