From the Editor

ON THE COVER

Sharing Hope

Hoover resident Lindsay Gray is the executive director of Bundles of Hope, which supplies diapers to those in the Birmingham community who live below the poverty line. Photo by Morgan Hunt Design by Kimberly Myers AAs we enter the holidays, I’m reminded that as much as I love good food, a festive atmosphere and dressing up, I don’t love parties—at least not big parties. It can be fun for a short bit to mingle around, meet people and come across familiar faces, but quickly I’m longing for a one-on-one coffee date or meal around a small table, to dig into nextlevel depth of conversation. That’s part of why it’s fun to create magazine stories for you where we share in-depth conversations with people doing interesting things in our community that you might not get a chance to have with them at a party. For our cover story, writer Amy Ferguson had a one-on-one coffee-type conversation with Lindsay Gray about the Bundles of Hope

Diaper Bank, her background as a nurse and her passion for the bank’s work. But before you get there, I let you in on my conversations with a filmmaker about a very real narrative on veteran suicide, and on a related mental health note, one with two Hoover City Schools employees who host a podcast on mental health and wellness. And then there’s our intern Gabby Bass-Butler’s story of Santos Coffee. Even if you are well acquainted with their drinks and coffee shop, you might not have had a long talk with its owner about their family coffee farms in Guatemala and decades of family history tied to the coffee business that Gabby lets us in on. Just after that is a compilation of several conversations I had about a historic home on the Cahaba River, with its homeowners, with the owner of the furniture store that helped design many of the rooms and with a realtor who knows a lot of the home’s history. Elsewhere in the magazine, our annual Holiday Gift Guide is also full of ideas for those who are both easy and hard to buy for on your list all while shopping local, and as we head into 2022, our Hit the Road feature this season takes you to three resorts in the Carolinas where you can be active in all kinds of off-the-beaten-path ways. As we celebrate the holidays and the New Year, here’s to all the rich stories that our community will continue to live and that our team at

Hoover’s Magazine has the pleasure to share with you! Feel free to send ideas for them my away any time.

madoline.markham@hooversmagazine.com