2024 Year in Review
Once again, it feels like the end of the year has appeared out of nowhere. Blink and it will be 2025. The decorations will be coming back down, my gym attendance will be going back up, and who knows, it might even get cold here in Texas! The new year with all its adventures and challenges will be launched.
Because this time of year can go so quickly, I personally find the tradition of pausing to look back at the year that’s ending very significant and grounding. Part of it is nostalgia, like how I’m a sucker for the best books of the year lists, the rankings of people and headlines who made the biggest impacts, and my family’s New Years tradition of making a photo book of the pictures we took throughout the previous year. But another part has to do with deeper purpose - I need to look further ahead and behind so I can see where it is we’re headed to so quickly and subsequently reset my priorities to things that matter. I also need to recall the things that affected me powerfully and are worth remembering and taking with me. As a believer in a God who is active yet hard to perceive in the everyday, it’s important for me to give credit to Him for prayers answered and to make note of where and how I saw Him undeniably intervene.
To those ends, I invite you to join me for a look back on 2024 at OnRamp DFW and to celebrate and note the ways God has used a handful of volunteers (and 1 staff member!) to share his grace and provision to amazing people in our community whom he loves, and who needed a hand-up.
If you were counting, you might have seen that we were able to help 15 clients with vehicles this year! Wow! I got a little overwhelmed finding all their photos and then standing back and seeing them all on one page. There are a few things we find amazing about this:
Helping a specific number of clients WASN’T our top goal for the year
Our financial donations were down this year compared to last year
At the end of August, we were at 7 clients helped
Each of the applicants who were approved this year received a vehicle - God provided the exact right people and the right amount of resources.
Though these clients have received a vehicle, our work and service to them is not finished. We will continue to support these 15 individuals/families with vehicle maintenance, with prayer, and their Client Care representative will check in regularly to see how they are doing. We invite you to join us in praying for them, as they have determined to move forward despite extremely hard circumstances.
Here are a few more highlights worth celebrating from 2024:
10 vehicles were donated to us by generous people in DFW! Most of them were able to be repurposed and donated to our clients. We are still in awe over this display of generosity from our neighbors.
2 new board members and 4 amazing new volunteers joined the OnRamp DFW team and have had an enormously positive impact on our ability to care for our clients.
We hired our first staff member! Tara Jones has shaped our administrative processes and had an immediate impact on our communication bottlenecks. We could not do this without her.
We simplified our internal processes by running our applications and vehicles through Smartsheet (thank you, Blake!) and our finances through QuickBooks.
We improved processes in all areas of the organization. Our Client Care Team is more organized and connected, our social media presence is more robust and engaging, and our vehicle pathway from purchase to donation is streamlined.
We hosted the first all-OnRamp mini-conference. Our counterparts from Brazos County came up to spend the day to share learnings, talk vision, and to mutually encourage each other.
We held our first all-client and volunteer lunch in November
You may also have noticed from the above photos that we increasingly served a new kind of clientele in 2024. Whereas some of our first clients were foreigners who had found refuge in the United States, (a group who continues to be close to our hearts and who we are continuing to add as clients), this year we were able to connect with some amazing organizations in DFW who are helping women and their children escape from trafficking, homelessness, and domestic violence. Organizations such as Unbound Now, Genesis Women’s Shelter, The Net, UGM, and others heard about OnRamp DFW and took a chance on us, that we weren’t going to disappoint them and the people they were caring for who had already been through so much. Many of these organizations came from a good distance away - S. Dallas and Ft. Worth - and we heard a repeated message that has become familiar: “Our clients need a vehicle in order to keep the progress they’ve made” and “There’s no one in DFW who is doing what OnRamp is doing.”
I don’t mean that to say we are special or better than any other non-profits who are operating in DFW. Or that we want to monopolize this ministry idea - we would welcome and share ideas with 10 more organizations like ours who wanted to move into this space tomorrow! But it is dawning on us how great the need is, and how key a role a vehicle plays in self-sufficiency.
If you haven’t seen it already, check out this video by our OnRamp friends in Brazos County about how it’s not even about the vehicle.
I would like to close by saying a huge thank-you to everyone inside and outside of OnRamp DFW who has entrusted their talents, time and resources to the shared purpose of loving our neighbors with tangible assistance and the good news of God’s grace. We are so encouraged by you!
To God be the Glory
David and the OnRamp DFW Team
