Community Renewal restores safe, caring communities

We go “way back” to our days growing up in Shreveport, playing tennis at Pierremont Oaks and spending our high school years at Captain Shreve. When I recently met Jimmy Graves at Julie Anne’s Bakery & Cafe, my first question was how he got involved with Community Renewal International, where he serves as director of development.

Before he would answer, however, Graves wanted me to catch him up on what I had been doing for the past 20 years. The interviewer became the interviewee.

We spent the first part of our visit talking about the past and catching each other up on the present. He and wife Leanne (who have been married 33 years) have two daughters: Amanda and her husband live in Shreveport with their three children (two girls and a boy), while Anna lives in Midway, Utah, with her husband and daughter.

He’s been unable to play tennis for the past three months because of a foot injury, but he’s looking forward to returning to the court soon.

As he told me about his path to Community Renewal, Graves said something I found very interesting: “The two greatest days in a person’s life are the day they were born and the day they discover why they were born.”

Graves was born Nov. 23, 1962. It took him a few years to discover why.

After graduating from Captain Shreve in 1980, Graves went to Louisiana Tech – where he “did the traditional fraternity life, yada, yada, yada, party boy.” He was unaware of its importance back then, but something happened in his second year in college that would prove to have a major impact on him. He just didn’t know it yet.

After getting his finance degree, Graves returned to Shreveport and worked with Commercial National Bank in its management training program. After five years in the banking business, he knew it was time to make a change.

His wife Leanne – the two had met in a singles group at their church – was pregnant with their first child, and Graves knew he needed to look for something a little more lucrative as his family began to expand.

“I had some friends in the medical equipment business. One thing led to another, and I went to work with a company out of Boston,” he says. “I was their local guy in the Ark-La-Tex area selling hospital supplies and equipment.

“As many young people do in that industry, you work five years and find an opportunity that pays better.”

So, that’s what he did, going to work for a medical equipment company out of San Diego. He also had become very involved in his church.

This was when Graves made an important life decision.

Back when he was a sophomore at Louisiana Tech, a Ruston businessman came to Graves’ fraternity house and talked to the young men.

“He shared his testimony from a business perspective, a young man’s perspective,” recalls Graves. “It kind of opened the door to my thinking about life outside of chasing the typical American dream.”

He now calls that experience a “moment.” Or an “epiphany.”

“I felt called or compelled to take on a role with the pastoral staff at church,” he says.

That meant taking a 75 percent reduction in pay, but he and Leanne decided it was the right thing to do. “I had done well enough,” says Graves, “that we had paid off our debt and didn’t have a lot hanging over us.”

So, in 1998 (at the age of 36), Graves gave up chasing the typical American dream and went into church ministry. For a few years, that seemed to be enough.

By the time 2002 rolled around, however, Graves was feeling removed from the community – he didn’t feel in touch with the Shreveport of his roots. So he started to ask himself some questions.

“Am I going to go back into business? Am I going to stay in some type of full-time vocational ministry? I didn’t know,” he says.

Then he was reconnected with Mack McCarter.

In the early 1990s, when Graves was still in medical sales, he met McCarter at an outreach program his church was part of in downtown Shreveport.

“We would meet on Saturday mornings,” Graves says of those days. “We would go out in pairs and walk the Bottoms – Sprague Street, Ledbetter Heights, Allendale, Lakeside, Milam. We’d walk the area and meet people.

“We told them we were with a local group, but we weren’t with any sort of church affiliation. We’d ask them if there was anything we could help them with or anything we could pray with them about.”

That experience was something Graves would never forget.

And it all came flooding back to him when he and McCarter – a pastor at churches in west Texas before coming back to his hometown of Shreveport and starting Community Renewal International in 1994 – reconnected in 2002.

CRI is a faith-based, non-profit organization that brings together caring partners to restore the foundation of safe and caring communities. Today, it is an international model for all cities looking to bring renewal to their communities.

The more he and McCarter talked, the more Graves realized that this is how he could fulfill what he calls “a mysterious desire to help people find their meaning and purpose in life.”

That’s when it happened: He knew why he had been born. The second greatest day in Graves’ life was when he joined the team at Community Renewal in 2003.

“I’ve always had this heart for the underdog and for the less fortunate, the disadvantaged,” says Graves, who serves as CRI’s director of development.

But there’s more to it than that. To Graves, it’s not just the disadvantaged looking for their purpose in life.

“Whether it’s a 10-year-old walking the streets of Cedar Grove without a mom or dad – living with grandmother – or a 45-year-old businessman or woman who lives behind the gates of Southern Trace who ‘has it made,’” he explains.

Everyone is searching for their purpose. For those who seem to have “made it,” that can mean allowing them to find their “real” riches in life by letting go of their time, talent and money.

“The last thing I want somebody to describe Community Renewal as is a poverty program,” he says. “At the heart of what we do is help people find meaning and purpose in their life. We help them find avenues to do that.”

Graves is trying to connect people, all people, to a more transcendent cause in their life where they can tap into why God created them.

So they can experience the second-greatest day in their life. Just like he has.

Follow Harriet Penrod at the Shreveport- Bossier Journal at www.shreveportbossierjournal.com. Contact Harriet at sbjharriet@gmail.com.