Posted: 11/11/05
Brantley Center houses volunteers
NEW ORLEANS (ABP)–What do you do when you run a homeless shelter and the city has evacuated all the homeless? That's the situation facing Tobey Pitman, director of the Brantley Mission Center in New Orleans.
As the city rebuilds from Hurricane Katrina, Pitman is among the many local residents who must adjust to a new sense of normal. “We're retooling our ministry,” said Pitman, 50. “We've gotten out of the homeless business temporarily because there are no homeless.”
Instead, the Brantley Center reopened as a 250-bed dorm for Baptist volunteers coming from throughout the country to rebuild churches and homes. “There's at least a year's work to be done,” he said. “We just hope the interest is not lost in coming to New Orleans.”
Originally housed in a rented gambling hall, the center later relocated to a hotel in the French Quarter before it moved again to its current location in 1962. In the 1940s, it was named for Clovis Brantley, a local pastor and leader of the agency that became the North American Mission Board, who became known as the “father of urban ministries.”
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