A Message from our Executive Directors
For City of Refuge Athens (CORA), 2023 was a year full of expansion. Our ability to bring light and hope to the Athens-Clarke County area increased in a variety of areas:
We accomplished our goal of being able to provide weekend food bags to children facing food insecurity in all 26 Athens-Clarke County schools on a weekly basis! We served 60,937 children’s weekend food bags in 2023 – an increase of nearly 20,000 weekend food bags!
We were able to scale our distribution of grocery boxes to families and senior adults facing food insecurity to an annual total of 19,852 grocery boxes – an increase of almost 4,000 boxes!
Transformation came in the form of CORA’s pilot tutoring program which began at the start of the 2023-2024 school year. A total of 22 students from one of the most at risk elementary schools in Athens-Clarke County were selected to participate in this program, and a semester later these students have shown tremendous, sustained academic improvement. We have eagerly developed a five-year plan that includes developing equivalent tutoring programs in every elementary school in the county!
This has been an incredible year for CORA, and we simply could not have done this without your support! We want to extend a most heartfelt thank you to everyone who gave their time and talents to CORA in 2023; each and every one of you played a crucial role in the success of CORA’s goals. It was only with the generous help of over 5,100 volunteers serving an annual total of 9,000 hours that we were able to expand our outreach directly, enabling us to feed more families and children.
We believe that 2024 will continue to facilitate growth in CORA’s outreach as we move to a facility 3.5 times larger than our current location. We have already begun renovation on our new building, and we hope to be moving in by the end of March! We are confident that God has great plans for 2024 and that He will continue to show His love for people in ways we cannot yet imagine!