A ‘Step-Up’ initiative that started at a Global Leadership Summit in Danville last summer is making advances in tackling some key issues. Drew Mentzer, Senior Minister at Danville’s Second Church of Christ, says it is an effort to make a real difference in the community…
‘’It’s real easy to complain about problems and things, and mistakes and failures. It’s real easy to point out some of the downside, but there’s a lot of great things in this community. And what the ‘Step-Up’ program is (doing is) bringing people together from community organizations – non-profits, churches – and saying ‘what can we do to solve some of the problems and to take care of some of the issues,’’ said Reverend Mentzer. ‘’And it’s been a great opportunity for government agencies to get together, non-profits, churches and to work together to kind of collaborate on what can we do to help on some of the issues we have here,’’ added Mentzer.
One problem the ‘Step Up’ group discovered was that when local residents needed mental health services, often-times they did not have available transportation to get to those services in other cities. Today it was announced that problem has been solved with the donation of a car from Wright Motor Company of Danville and the church agreeing to provide insurance and volunteers to get people to their mental health appointments.
Reverend Mentzer says the ‘Step-Up’ efforts are focusing on three areas…
‘’One of them was family parenting issues – the family problems we have in our community. One of them was the drug issue and what can we do to help with that. And then the third one was to talk about what we can do as far as the mental health crisis that we see – the suicides and those kinds of things,’’ said Reverend Mentzer. ‘’And so we’ve really been focusing on those three major areas, and then we have sub-issues underneath of those related to that,’’ he added.
And Reverend Mentzer says the efforts are going to be continuing indefinitely…
‘’We really feel that doing this is making a big difference because it gives an opportunity for us to know what’s going on in other organizations, gives an opportunity for us to gather information to know what is already available – but then to also develop new programs or new help agencies that may be able to deal with some of the crisis problems,’’ said Reverend Mentzer during an interview with VermilionCountyFirst.com News.
Another Global Leadership Summit is going to be held in Danville this year on August 9th and 10th.
