Mission & Service

The Farm, located three miles from CITP, provides integrated therapeutic programs to individuals with mental and physical challenges. Programs include:

• Tiny Homes – “Housing is health care”. The 15 tiny homes have been completed and will be inhabited by the end of 2024. Refrigerators for all 15 homes were donated by CITP. Donations for furnishings are needed and socialization with the residents is encouraged. Their Tiny Home Project is a landmark proof-of-concept!
• Heat and Eat Meals – Working with a local restaurant, healthy fresh meals are provided weekly by the Farm to clients with multiple health factors. CITP volunteers package meals each Wednesday afternoon.
• The Farm Garden – During growing seasons, CITP folks clear, mulch, weed, and harvest at the garden - come get in the dirt!
• Bunny Village – providing petting therapy to calm anxiety. Volunteers needed to tend and clean bunny cages - visits to pet the bunnies are welcomed!

The mission of Community Organizing for Racial Equity (CORE) is to deconstruct systemic inequities and achieve equitable outcomes for all Chatham County residents through education, organizing, and reconciliation. Their vision is to create racial equity by working with interested individuals, community groups, religious organizations, and nonprofits in Chatham County. CITP partners with and supports CORE.

The Chatham Literacy Council helps adults acquire literacy and other life skills. It provides free tutoring in adult goal-based education, including English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), Spanish literacy, financial literacy, high school equivalency degree preparation, citizenship test preparation, and digital literacy. Recent workshop topics include understanding children’s report cards, why and how to vote, and how to budget money. CITP volunteers are encouraged to teach a class; interested folks are invited to sit in on any class.

Chatham Chuckwagon is supported by six local churches, a few local businesses and several organizations who, collectively, prepare restaurant-quality frozen entrées for Chatham residents in need of nutritional support. Church teams use certified church kitchens to cook about 200+ protein-rich servings each week, then vacuum seal, freeze, and distribute them from St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Pittsboro and other locations. Come cook each month with our CITP Chuckwagon team. Chuckwagon is one of three hunger alleviation programs operated by Alliance Serving Chatham County (ASCC).

Love Chatham is a banner under which churches, individuals, businesses are working to alleviate homelessness and other needs in Chatham County. The first focus is on homelessness. They plan / hope to continue the work of charity and healing in the future by joining, connecting with, or establishing help for hunger, clothing, healthcare, furnished households, financial planning, and spiritual counseling. Service options change and may be found on the Love Chatham website.

Volunteers from CITP visit the young women and men detained at the Chatham Youth Development Center in Siler City. Crafting yarn, snacks, clothing and Christmas presents are purchased and delivered by CITP. Programs are structured to improve the resident’s life skills. Visits include conversation, encouragement, creative art, games and sharing snacks. Please consider volunteering to shop for clothing and/or gifts or to visit.

The Fuel Up program at Perry Harrison Elementary School is a backpack food program that helps food- insecure children. Each weekend the backpacks contain enough food for two breakfasts, two lunches, three dinners and two snacks. Food is sent home with children for weekends, holidays and summer break. The program has been expanded to include providing in school snacks for all students in a class. Support to Fuel-Up can take the form of monetary donation or food purchases from the Fuel-Up wish list.

The Chatham Outreach Alliance (CORA) Food Pantry serves residents facing food insecurity in Chatham County by collecting food and donations and distributing healthy food to residents. Services include drive-thru pick-up of food. Support comes to CORA through donation of food and money, and through volunteering to stock, package and distribute food.

Chatham Habitat for Humanity works to change substandard housing conditions by making home ownership possible for low income families. CITP volunteers help build homes from ground up to the final move-in. Volunteers needed to perform light building duties. Supervision and coaching provided.

This program surrounds students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve success in life, including working with youth who have committed crimes in Chatham County to learn responsibility and accountability. CITP provides funds and volunteer tutors as support.

In the mobile home community called The Nature Trail, many children from low-income Latinx families struggle to overcome obstacles to academic success. Learning Trail provides low-income children, pre-K through 8th grade, and their families with needed academic and social support to help children reach their full potential. Volunteer tutors are welcome.

Benevolence Farm provides transitional employment and living programs for women leaving North Carolina prisons. They seek to cultivate leadership, promote sustainable livelihoods, and reap structural change for and in women impacted by the criminal legal system. Purchasing candles and soaps made at Benevolence Farm is one way to support these women.

The Protestant Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America (CEDEPCA) is an educational institution that contributes to the transformation of lives and contexts by providing training and accompaniment. It offers spaces for reflection to women and men from diverse Christian traditions, communities and contexts. Their focus is to be a home community of common pastoral learning for pastoral students from multiple faiths and countries, rooted in a liberating faith, working for abundant life and fostering peace with justice.

Most recently, CITP has provided its missionary support to both Rev. Dr. Karla Koll in Costa Rica and Betsey Moe in Guatemala. Since 2013, Rev. Koll has served as a Presbyterian Church (USA) Mission Co-worker and professor of history, mission and religion at the Latin American Biblical University (UBL), an ecumenical university located in San Jose, Costa Rica. Since 2010 and until year-end 2024, Betsey has been working as a facilitator for the Intercultural Encounters Program of the Protestant Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America (CEDEPCA). CEDEPCA provides North American church groups, theological seminarians, and college/university students the opportunity to discover Guatemala in all its diversity, beauty, and complexity, and to experience the everyday life of Guatemalans through immersion programs.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance enables congregations and mission partners of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to witness to the healing love of Christ through caring for communities adversely affected by crises and catastrophic events. These donations enable immediate response to national and international disasters and strengthen ongoing work such as training and development, refugee ministry, and response to disasters that do not receive media attention.

The Presbyterian Hunger Program (PHP) of the PC(USA) strives to alleviate hunger and eliminate its causes. PC(USA) recognizes hunger as an extremely complex phenomenon with economic, political, environmental and social causes. They work to address the “root causes” that keep people hungry and impoverished. They have provided grants from North Carolina to Madagascar.

Founded in 2010, WCK quickly earned its reputation of being first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. They believe that “when you talk about food and water, people don't want a solution one week from now, one month from now. The solution has to be now.” WCK teams across the world remain deeply committed to serving delicious, chef-prepared meals to people with the dignity they deserve. As the climate-crisis worsens and disasters become not only larger, but more frequent, WCK commits to be there—and they hope others will join. As their founder Chef José Andrés likes to say, “everyone is a part of World Central Kitchen, they may just not know it yet!”.

In 2024, CITP adopted a family – husband, wife, five-year-old girl and three-year-old boy – who resettled to the U.S. after the American forces pulled out completely from Afghanistan. In Kabul, the father had been employed supporting the U.S. Army and the Afghanistan Nation Army. Support needed includes: (1) monetary donations to aid with rent (use the CITP Donate Button); (2) helping the husband/father find a job that takes advantage of his work experience in Kabul and his Bachelor's degree in Economics (he is now significantly under-employed); and (3) befriending this family, establishing a lasting welcome and warmth. Do you have the skills to coach someone in their U.S. job search? Can you be a friend?