Agape Nation is a new nonprofit established in December 2023 and was born out of Maranatha Outreach (dba Maranatha Alabama) established in December 2022.  Over the past year, Maranatha Outreach has been serving adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD) and their caretakers by hosting free monthly events to provide an avenue for recreation and community involvement.  Opportunities in a rural community such as ours are extremely limited and we have been blessed to be able to serve over 100 adults with ID/DD and their caretakers.  When Maranatha Outreach started, the long-term goal was to open a day program to provide continued education, recreation, job training, and community involvement for a group of people that are often forgotten and left behind.  To this end, Agape Nation was established.  Our mission is to provide a school-like environment in Etowah County where adults with ID/DD are valued for who they are, given opportunities to achieve personal fulfillment, and empowered to discover, experience, and realize their full potential as members of the greater community.  Services in Etowah County are essentially non-existent due to the lack of available Medicaid funding, multi-year waiting lists, limited program offerings or services, and program hours that don’t fit caretaker needs.  This leaves many families without any viable options or support and also results in caretakers struggling to help the adult in their care live out healthy, fulfilling, and meaningful lives.  This ultimately leads to the adult with ID/DD staying at home with their caretaker, staying with other paid or unpaid caretakers so the primary caretaker can work, or being placed into a group home.  This is not an ideal situation for the adult with ID/DD as they tend to lack the continued educational, recreational, therapeutic and community activities that make life worth living.  Having limited access to the world at large, or with a community that is like them, often results in loneliness, loss of esteem, skill set regression, and many other negative unintended consequences.

Agape Nation’s biggest need is funding.  Like any business, it is challenging for a new organization to obtain seed money to start up, to include funding that will allow us secure a building or a lease to a building to operate out of.  Being so new, there are few grants available to us so we are pursuing every avenue possible to obtain funding.  As part of this effort, our organization is hosting a silent auction and comedy show to raise funds to open the program.