Nonprofit Spotlight

Loads of Love

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

Ministry comes in a variety of forms – and for the Rev. Lisa Cook, God speaks as clearly through a fresh batch of laundry as through anything else.

“I don’t try to fix anybody, I don’t try to figure out what they’ve been doing wrong and make them do something right,” Cook said. “What I do is meet them where they are, and show them love.”

Cook has been providing laundry for the homeless and impoverished for almost as long as she’s been in Christian ministry – nearly eight years. She does this through Loads of Love, a nonprofit initiative quietly thriving in St. Luke Cumberland Presbyterian Church.

“It was a need that wasn’t being met anywhere in Nashville,” she said. “I was surprised at how, I mean, this is something that people just can’t get done anywhere. It’s so expensive to go to the laundromat, and there’s so many barriers.”

While it may be easy to take the relative ubiquity of laundry services for granted, homelessness and poverty impose a number of hurdles. Loads of Love is one of the only services near Nashville working to close that particular gap.

“If you live in a camp… first of all, you have to get there. So you have to drag your clothes somewhere – on the bus, or you have to walk. And then when you get there, you need money, and then you need detergent and all the supplies. So we’ve just taken all those barriers away, and it has really been something the community has appreciated, I think.”

The operation is as big as it has ever been, with dozens of folks served on a weekly basis. They are shuttled to the church in Madison, where they are provided a hot meal and the facilities to do baskets full of laundry. In Cook’s words, all the clients need to bring is a batch of dirty clothes and an appetite.

But Loads of Love all began a bit less methodically, without the name, base of support or central location it bears today.

“A group of friends at my home church that I was baptized in had the idea … They said, 'you know, ‘you could just collect a bunch of quarters and churches and take people to the laundromat,’” she explained. “We’ve been doing that for eight years.”

“For those eight years, it was pretty much just me, kinda doing it all on my own with help from whoever came to laundry that day.”

Cook ran the operation like that for years, drifting from laundromat to laundromat, before settling into the church location this year, which quickly grew to have a team of volunteers.

“We had to move around a lot because there’s so many stereotypes with this community. We would be accused of things that absolutely weren’t going on, and, you know, we’d have to leave, Cook said. “If they were smoking cigarettes outside, all of a sudden, it’d be that they were smoking crack outside. That’s just not what was happening.”

These burdens have been lifted by the move to the new location, where the growing community has been able to flourish. While such a move might typically come with a slew of challenges and barriers, Cook has found the transition relatively painless.

“It’s so much easier,” Cook said. “I have volunteers now … the barriers were during that eight-year exodus.”

One such volunteer is kitchen manager Stacey Farley, who is also a vendor with the Contributor. Like all of the nonprofit’s volunteers, she started out being served by the ministry.

“It’s amazing, I have a passion for the kitchen, I love preparing meals for people, “ Farley said. “That’s what keeps me volunteering, ‘cause I know that I’m providing something for somebody that doesn’t get it.”

Farley has been with Loads of Love since May, and said the journey so far has been incredible.

“I’ve watched Loads of Love grow,” she said. “It’s been a blessing to see a ministry move like this.”

Cook said it helped establish a sense of community to have volunteers who understood the plight of poverty firsthand.

“If I brought somebody in from my home church, they don’t understand what it means not to have a meal. Stacey can appreciate, when she provides a meal, what it means to the person on the other end of that plate.”

Cook said she was happy with the boom in activity over the last year, but remains ambitious, hoping to increase the number of shifts to serve even more people.

“We’re doing about 10 to 12 people a day, so around 40 to 50 a week, so if we did another group in the afternoon, we could double what we’re doing,” Cook explained.

Regardless of how the future ends up, though, Cook looks forward to maintaining a simple theology of love – and expressing it through her work..

“If you could sum up my theology in one word, it’s love. God has not asked us to do much; there’s two things, really, that we’ve been asked to do. That is to love God, and to love people. If you do those things, well, all the other stuff seems to take care of itself.”