My Father’s House, a film by Rob Shearer, is now screening at the Denver Film Festival. It calls attention to these very people. Those among us who often do the thankless and hard work. Not in trendy open-concept downtown offices, but in the community, wherever that community may reside. In this particular case, we are talking about the Village Exchange Center in Aurora, Colorado. The documentary chronicles resident pastor Marcel Narucki in his defining decision to convert what was St. Matthew’s Lutheran church into the non-profit Village Exchange Center dedicated to becoming a genuine community hub.
While assessing what mission the new-found non-profit would have, there were a number of factors to take into account. “This neighborhood is comprised largely of refugees and immigrants and so, if we were going to do something that was responsive, it has to be [something involving] that.” Marcel told me.
Co-founder and Executive Director of what has become the Village Exchange Center, Amanda Blaurock, gave me the play-by-play of how the Village Exchange Center was birthed and has held up during the last year of Covid induced challenges.
“We created Village Exchange Center which has the mission of celebrating religious and cultural diversity. We do that with a multitude of programs. We have eight congregations that worship here from all around the world. We have 21 resident partner tenants, which are everything from the Ethiopian community of Colorado, the Global Bhutanese of Colorado, South Sudanese of Colorado, plus other nonprofits like Focus Points, Project Worth More. We have programs that we created like the Natural Helpers Program, which is a partnership with the city of Aurora, where we work with and empower individuals from different communities so that they can be better leaders in our community.
When COVID hit, we pivoted our operations completely as a community center — obviously, we couldn’t have the same hundreds of people and events here. So we changed the food pantry program to be a mobile food pantry. And with that, we are giving 2,700 people food per week. Groceries that are culturally appropriate through the partnership with the city of Aurora that just gave us $175,000 to purchase culturally appropriate food from local merchants. So we’re actually giving back money to the community and then also providing culturally appropriate food.
We also became the payment partner on the Left Behind Workers Fund … We provide grants of $1,000 to individuals who lost their jobs due to COVID. So many people who are mixed-status or undocumented were not eligible to receive unemployment insurance— so here we have a huge disparity. In month three [of the pandemic] you had people making the same amount of money pre-COVID, one of them got $40,000 the other one got zero, so all we have been able to provide is $1,000 to make up that gap, which is not big, but at least as a start, and we have hit 6.5 million that has been dispersed. We’ve recently received additional funding from the state of Colorado, which is Care’s money to start rental assistance, so those same individuals who receive the $1,000 stipends can also receive up to $7,500 in rental assistance because again, that’s just another way to provide the support.”
While hanging out at the Village Exchange Center, I was able to talk to Rob about what prompted him to embark on making the documentary in the first place.
“I originally got interested in helping the Village Exchange Center after I met Amanda through a mutual friend. After hearing about the center, I was really inspired by their mission so I started doing volunteer video work for them. Then after meeting Marcel and learning about his life and how it was his church that donated their building to become VEC, Amanda and I thought it would make a great story for a doc. Religion in the modern world is a topic that fascinates me, so this story was right up my alley!”
There is a lot of pessimism in the discourse surrounding the future of America— with COVID and an election looming, I thought it important to cap off our interview by digging deeper into artistic intent. What, in such an uncertain time, does Rob want you (the viewer) to take away from this film?
“The main thing I hope people take away from this film is that failure can be an inspiration for good. Even outside the film’s context of religion and immigration in America, I hope people can see how something that one person viewed as a failure became an important and helpful part of the community, and hopefully reevaluate the failures in their own lives. The second thing I would want for people to take away from the film is that a church doesn’t have to close to become open to the community. I think more churches should open their doors and be more active in their communities and provide not just spiritual resources, but financial and educational resources like VEC does, and they can do this before it’s too late.”