Twelve years of kitchen-table work in Ingham County

Our beginning

The conference was formed in the spring of 2014 by a group of eleven volunteers who had spent the previous winter driving space heaters around the east side of Lansing. What began as an informal phone tree became a registered nonprofit conference with a permanent address on Magazine Street in 2016.

The name honours Frédéric Ozanam, a nineteenth-century law professor who argued that charity is not a transfer of goods but a relationship between equals. That single idea still decides how we operate: we go to people, we sit with them, and we do not ask them to prove their worth.

What we believe

Poverty in a mid-sized American city is rarely one catastrophe. It is a car repair, a reduced shift, a medical bill and a rent increase arriving in the same month. Our job is to remove one or two of those pressures quickly enough that the household keeps its footing. We are not a substitute for public assistance, and we say so plainly — we are the gap-filler that moves faster than a benefits queue.