Finding Faith: Holiday fundraiser to help support hundreds of families in need in time for holidays

In today’s Finding Faith Segment, Reverend Richard Hunter joined us Thursday on “Life.Style.Live!” to discuss the effort to help 565 families with a week’s worth of groceries and a turkey to anyone in need, especially the homeless and veterans.

They have also already spent about $1,000 to get coats to homeless Veterans when temperatures first started to drop.

Reverend Richard Hunter Ministries is participating in a fundraiser on Saturday, Dec. 3 at 7 p.m. to help support their efforts. Admission is free, and there will be great food, a silent auction, door prizes, old-school music and more.

Here’s more from the Reverend:

Rev. Richard Hunter Ministries a 501c3 organization started this ministry out of the need to serve the city of Indianapolis in a time of need at Christmas. In 1996, an effort was made by AM 1310 to serve food to needy families. The station has been the vehicle to receive letters with the needs spelled out for us to select for help. We have now branched out to include many other concerns in the city to help in this effort. It has helped greatly. By setting up a hotline for the ministry it received hundreds of calls from needy families which were served.

The station did not have the resources budgeted to fund this effort so; Rev. Richard Hunter took it upon himself to volunteer his services and the funds for this program from his personal funds for the first few years.  Those years we serviced a large box of food to 60 families for help at Christmas. 

That number has escalated to as high as 600+ families which convert to thousands of individuals.  The ministry has even provided other assistance to families in the form of clothing, household items and other items through generous donations.  We have teamed with the New Beginnings Ministries under the direction of Bishop Lavern Tyson which provides a place for us and some donations to help serve the Indianapolis community. 

The Ministry continued to grow and we were given the vision to make sure all fresh food was in the boxes. The amount of food grew to include a week’s worth of groceries, fruits, vegetables, canned goods, a turkey and other things was important so we began to buy everything fresh to assemble these boxes to help the family. 

The vision continued to grow to include help for Veteran families.  W partnered with AMVET and other organizations that would get to homeless and needy veterans.  We supplied food and clothing for the homeless and food and other resources to veteran families in need. 

Our vision has escalated where we want to help the families more so in 2022, we launched a website revrichardhunterministries.org to put information and help the needs of the family.  We are partnering with many organizations to place permanent information that can be updated and improved so that families will have a resource to go to.  We want to teach families and individuals to budget their lives, be safe, correct situations that will improve each family and correct situations that will allow them to get better jobs and help the community.   

Last year, we served many families with hundreds of donated toys for the children and we helped many families get their utilities kept on or turned on for Christmas.  We also serviced many individuals with clothing help in the form of school clothing and winter assistance. 

We continue to increase our efforts by servicing more families upwards of the 1,000 goal set by our organization. We are continuing to fulfill the toy need of the younger and some of the older children and we are especially honored to help families to stay warm and have some of the small comforts that so many may take for granted such as heat, lights and water. 

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