Rockford
Urban Ministries Work Camps: An Introduction
Rockford Urban Ministries Work Camps is a project of Rockford Urban
Ministries, a nonprofit organization comprised of 22 area churches.
These faith-based folks work together on social justice and community issues,
especially in the urban areas of Rockford, IL. Rockford Urban Ministries,
affectionately termed “RUM,” invites groups to come to downtown Rockford to
work for a day, a week, or anywhere in between, on a variety of different
projects that aim to improve and empower the declining downtown area. A typical
stay at 
a RUM
work camp might include doing demolition at a rehab site, painting
a house to be rented to low-income families, serving meals at a local soup
kitchen, and landscaping the yard of a crisis daycare center. You provide the
volunteers and your RUM work camp leader will coordinate your stay and lovingly
tell you what to do. The project started when Rockford Urban Ministries helped
shut down, and then moved into the site of, a former pornographic bookstore at
623 Seventh St. in 1992. When RUM asked for help rehabbing the building, a youth
group from Rock Falls U.M.C responded with more than 20 volunteers, a
professional painter led the crew, and a local hardware store provided the
materials at a discounted cost (pictured left). This type of community support
convinced Rockford Urban Ministries to establish a work camp experience for
Rockford. With a start-up grant from the Methodist Northern IL Conference, we
surveyed the community and found four nonprofit housing rehab organizations that
could use volunteers. We also found numerous soup kitchens, food pantries, and neighborhood groups that were willing to use volunteers. We then developed and
distributed flyers to the United Methodist Conference and our first official
crews arrived in the spring of 1994. Now in our 6th year, our work
camp has drawn Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Unitarian Universalist,
Mennonites and Catholics from all over the Midwest and we’ve even gotten some
international folks! With growing support (and maybe some divine intervention)
our work camp continues to expand.
Everything
You Need to Know About Work Camp
Registration
Form
Click
to download
the Registration
form as a MS Word file.
Work camps
Brochure.doc