 Open Mesa started with an idea of simply getting a few families together for dinner and having conversation. Whether we were bilingual or not, that wasn't the primary goal. As it evolved and we started to understand more about opportunities, and as the spirit worked, I was introduced to different people along the way and found out about this apartment community, La Mirada. So last summer, the summer of 2023, I understood that the La Mirada Community Center had been rebuilt and was being utilized as a tutoring center and after-school care and summer camps for students kindergarten through fifth grade and that that was being managed by KidsU. Kids University, we are a nonprofit. We serve 100% low-income families in their apartment communities. So our target is 100% low-income multifamily units, 200 unit and above. And so we go in and we provide high quality tutoring and after-school education services to students kindergarten through eighth grade and we also serve their families. KidsU brings the knowledge and the expertise and the resources around after-school care, tutoring, parenting. We bring some caring hands, a relationship base where we can just listen to people and care with them or pray with them. Typically by the time the parents are coming to pick up the kids, the dinner is ready and so we invite everybody to come to the open table, the open mesa and while they're eating, we try to visit with them and then we have the program they see does the program with the crime watch so I usually translate for her. But we always learn something from the families especially when we sit with them and we talk to them about their own stories and their needs. Some of these families are immigrants and some of these families have left everything and many of them actually in their countries like Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico they tell us how difficult it was to get here and once they got here how hard it was to acclimate to everything. We never expected to have such a quality, such a deep relationship kind of discussion with someone that led to crying about how they crossed over the Rio Grande and what the challenges are of their life right now and just having to drop that they don't even have beds for their kids and when I heard that I was like, well we can get you beds. It's not that we can get the beds, it's that we had a discussion and they felt comfortable sharing that with us and that's what ministry with is. It's sharing information back and forth so that we could be in ministry with each other and what consistently comes out is I want ESL classes. I want parenting classes. I want, I want. We are just now on the edge of hiring an ESL teacher to use these funds to compensate that person and that will take a once a month dinner into a once a week meeting or at least twice a month. It never would happen if we didn't have the ability to go in and just have discussions and share ideas over a meal and hearing what they need, not me telling them what they need. It's definitely a work in progress but it is a success. I think our partnership with the Rappahoe is very strong. The families in this community love the church, they love kids you. The goal of Open Mesa at Lama Rata is long-term relationships to hopefully help immigrants stabilize the family life, understand more about the community around them, introduce them to partnerships that might be able to help them stabilize their lives like Network of Community Ministries and Richardson and help in whatever other ways we can to help explain or lift and transform their lives so that they have less stress, they have better resources and they're able to function well as a child of God.