A letter from our executive Director

There is nothing like a good shaking to rattle your life and break loose everything unessential. Use the crises of our time, take your pick which one, to refine your thinking around the essentials of life. It’s too good an opportunity to miss. What you find is that the only things that really matter are the timeless truths of faith, hope, and love. Loving others unconditionally is the thing most worth doing with your life, and where true transformational change appears.

The noise of the world falls away when we focus on that truth. An encounter with unconditional love changes a soul beyond any other experience one can have. It’s somewhat easy to love those who are good to us, those who behave in ways that seem right to us, and those whom we see as blameless victims. Harder to love well are those who don’t “do right;” whose “attitude needs adjusting” as your mother might say, the ones who are unsympathetic characters ripe for judgement. We want them to be accountable for their sins. We want them to measure up. Work harder; do better; straighten up and fly right. There is plenty of judgement to go around, enough even to judge ourselves. If we can see how others can do better, we can see how we’ve done the same things; fallen short of what we know to do.

When there’s so much judgement and differing opinions to crowd our minds, we can rise above the noise and focus on the one thing: unconditional love changes everything. That is the mission of First Fruit Ministries. We love through outreach to victims of human trafficking, to homeless people living in the woods and on the streets, and those fallen to sex as a survival tactic. We find them where they are and love them. We love with hot meals, safe homes, showers, laundry, supplies, medical care, therapy, recovery, and quality time spent together. Because when I find a human held captive in a life of sex trafficking the only response my soul can bear to give is an authentic compassion. When the horror of captivity is in your face, nothing less than unconditional love will do.

In 2021, in the midst of all the world shaking we’ve experienced, the natural response might be to hunker down, First Fruit Ministries has aggressively pushed out into the darkness of human trafficking and homelessness in our community to bring unconditional love and change to those desperate to find a way.

Our team launched 5.11 House to provide transitional housing and supportive services for victims of human trafficking, the only housing program of its kind in Wilmington. The addition of this new program serves men, women, and families with an incredible list of services and supports from initial crisis encounters through housing stability in permanent housing.

Our teams piloted a specialized outreach to human trafficking victims, scouring the streets and locations of sex work, engaging those being trafficked in our community with kindness and help.

We opened another day of outreach center services just for women, offering showers, laundry, meals, supplies, medical care, case management, and housing navigation services.

Community members adopted each room of 5.11 House and transformed them into serene spaces of peace for trafficking victims who are weary and traumatized.

The urgency to change the experience of human trafficking victims in our region who reach out for help led us to launch C.A.S.T., Collaborative Against Sex Trafficking. C.A.S.T. gathers a multi-disciplinary team of providers across the southeastern Carolinas to map the trafficking services already available, identify the gaps, and nurture collaborative relationships to create a healthy trafficking response network that is effective in identifying, engaging, and serving human trafficking victims across our region.

Your generosity is how God makes a way. This year has revealed to all of us what matters most in life — doing eternal work that changes lives. If you’d like to join us in this work, I invite you to become a Way Maker and partner with us financially to end human trafficking and homelessness in 2022. Thank you for walking alongside First Fruit Ministries as we put unconditional love into practice for those experiencing homelessness or trafficking.

In Christ,

Lee Anna Stoker

Executive Director