Come spend a day volunteering in the office at Church of the Reconciler (COTR) and someone will knock on the office door and ask, “How do I get my ID?” When this question invariably arises, we’re thankful for one of our key partners: Community on the Rise.
For the last several blog posts we’ve been shining a light on our ministries at COTR. As we continue to focus on our ministries, we need to highlight the work of Community on the Rise. So I sat down with Avery Rhodes, the Executive Director of Community on the Rise. My conversation with Avery will be shared in two blog posts.
Our regular volunteers are trained to respond to questions about an ID, birth certificate, or social security card by giving folks a small piece of paper with the name JoAnn Moak and the number for Community on the Rise.
Avery spoke often and proudly about JoAnn in our conversation. JoAnn currently serves as the manager of their ID program. She was one of the first people to enter the WHOLE program at Community on the Rise. She graduated from that program and is now on their rent-to-own path.
The ID program is called RISE: Restoring Identity for Stability & Empowerment. Keeping track of vital documents like ID, birth certificates, and social security cards while experiencing homelessness can be very difficult. Yet, without these documents members of Church of the Reconciler experiencing homelessness cannot get a job, apply for housing, or open a bank account.
In my conversation with Avery she points out that, “Nationwide - lack of documents is cited as the number one reason for prolonged homelessness.” Without these documents, it’s like “you're a ghost”, she says. Avery is convinced, “If we really want people to rejoin society then we ought to be willing to say - Look how difficult it is to be able to do that - and take steps to make it easier.” Community on the Rise was started to do just that. The pastors and leaders at Church of the Reconciler recognized the need for a dedicated ID service and gave Avery the space to start Community on the Rise in 2020.
Since opening six years ago, Community on the Rise has helped over 4,000 people recover documents! “When people recover their documents,” Avery observes, “they want to move forward.” This brings Avery back to JoAnn.
While experiencing homelessness, JoAnn came to Community on the Rise in 2020 to get her ID. Avery tells me, “JoAnn was escaping some family of origin violence and trying to find safety. She was choosing homelessness over the monster inside the house.”
“The first thing she needed,” Avery explains, “was an Alabama State ID so that she could get a job in Birmingham. That’s how I met her. She ended up wanting to stay and volunteer once she got her ID, and now she runs the whole program!”
In the years since JoAnn has overseen the program, she’s helped it develop in significant ways. “Dylan, when JoAnne came into the ID program,” Avery confesses, “I had a backpack with file folders stuck in the backpack. And Joanne was like, ‘Man, we need to organize!” Today the RISE program is, as of March 2026, the only organization in the state that receives certain Alabama Law Enforcement Agency (ALEA) services for its clients. This means Community on the Rise can help even more people recover their ID and other documents. This is a testament to the partnerships Community on the Rise has built with ALEA, particularly one employee named JJ who Avery describes as a “wonderful woman with a sing-songy voice.”
Not only that, it’s a testament to JoAnn and the three women in the WHOLE program at Community on the Rise who help people recover their documents. The women in the WHOLE program came to Community on the Rise looking for help recovering their ID while experiencing homelessness. “This allows them”, Avery describes, “to really know what people are going through when trying to recover their documents.”
These women, Avery recognizes, play a crucial role at Community on the Rise. When asked about what she’s grateful for, Avery says, “Above all, I'm grateful that I get to learn alongside my heroes every day, the women that I work with. I often say that if the roles were reversed, and I had experienced some from the trauma, the painful experiences, the constant, just really difficult, not well resourced scarcity, kind of situations that they found themselves in, would I be able to show up with the same kind of tenderness and grace, ambition, jokes, and humor? I don't know. These women remind me every day of what the human spirit is capable of. And it's such a gift to get to watch them thrive and fulfill their purpose. It's a beautiful thing.”
Of course, much of this beauty takes place in the space provided to Community on the Rise by COTR. Reflecting on the earliest days of Community on the Rise, when COTR offered the space at no cost, Avery explains, “Having this space be available for us through the church, enabled us to start.* We could not have opened and hit the ground running the way that we did, if it hadn't been for the Church of Reconciler welcoming us in and saying, ‘Go for it! Create it as you see it. Bring the vision to life.”
Six years later, that vision is alive and well!
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* Community on the Rise now helps to pay a portion of the building operating cost in our shared space.