Goodness Weekly 10.20.25
“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”
—Mother Teresa
WHAT’S GOOD
Friends of Charis Park
This coming Sunday, October 26, marks one year since the opening of Charis Park. It’s been an incredible year of neighbors gathering, children exploring, farmers providing, and nature flourishing in what was once a parking lot. As the steward of Charis Park, Sunset Ridge Collective directly oversees the care and maintenance of the park year round. This care includes park repairs and maintenance, seasonal plantings, and new installations, as well as community programming like the Sunset Ridge Farmers market every weekend.
To mark the park’s one year anniversary, we’re officially launching Friends of Charis Park, a donor membership, to ensure the park’s sustainability for generations to come. Friends will not only directly offset the costs of the park—which total $60,000+ every year—but they’ll also have the opportunity to engage with the park more deeply through quarterly volunteer days, farm field trips, and our first annual farm to table dinner happening next year.
We have several membership tiers, and are excited to invite you to join us as a Founding Friend now through December 1st when you sign up at the Pollinator level and above. As a thank you, all Founding Friends will receive a limited edition Founding Friend hat along with their regular member benefits.
Beginnings of Charis Park
Taylor Bates, Deputy Director, Sunset Ridge Collective
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Charis Park (pronounced “Care-iss”), I want to pause and tell the unlikely story of how a one-acre parking lot became a neighborhood park—a story part strategy, part creativity, and a whole lot of faith, hope, and mystery.
Before it was developed, I’ve been told this land was prairie. In the 1920s, it became part of a tuberculosis hospital campus—likely a park even then. Later it housed a Red Cross building, then became home to a growing church community. By the 1980s, when the church had outgrown that building, it was converted into an annex parking lot. Yet even then, life persisted. The lot hosted community gatherings, kids learning to ride bikes, and, during the pandemic, neighbors found in it a safe place to connect outdoors.
In 2017, as the congregation faced the reality of decades of slow decline, church leaders asked a sobering question: Would it matter to our neighbors if the church were gone? The answer, at the time, was largely no. We had become a commuter church, mostly disconnected from our immediate neighborhood. Instead of selling the property, the leadership chose to cultivate a new vision—one rooted in community belonging and generosity.
A group of 30 congregants met for a year to listen, discern, and dream. From that season of reflection, a vision took root: to transform the asphalt lot into something living again—a place of beauty and connection for the entire neighborhood. We were aware of the epidemic of loneliness, looming even before the pandemic deepened that ache, and we believed our land could play a small part in the healing.
We formed a park planning team that included neighbors. We wrote a Request for Proposals. We hired Coral Studio. We made plans, revised them, and learned patience when things took longer and cost more than we’d imagined. Yet the vision held. Hope, excitement, and generosity kept the project alive.
Then, like seeds carried on the wind, new life began to take root in unexpected ways.
In 2023, during construction, I met Linda Charlton for coffee. I knew she was interested in hosting nature-based programming for children. As it turned out, she had a wealth of experience—she helped start the Zoo School—and a dream of launching a new nature-based preschool. When she saw our campus and the vision for the park, something clicked. Within three months, Sprouts School opened its doors that fall. We had long dreamed of a preschool, but lacked the expertise. Then Linda arrived.
A year later, in the summer of 2024, I met Sarah Clavieres, a Sprouts parent who reached out with an idea for a regenerative farmers market. She’d helped start the Pearl Farmers Market and wanted to reimagine what a market could be—rooted in ecology and community. Coincidentally, I had just written a grant describing our hope to host markets in the park, though I had no plan for how to make it happen. And then Sarah arrived. By that fall, the Sunset Ridge Farmers Market was born.
Both women carried the same spark the park itself embodied: regeneration. From their energy, whole ecosystems of community have emerged. Sprouts students can now be seen walking to Charis Park, the McNay, the Terrell Heights Neighborhood Garden, and even Natural Grocers to restock our community food pantry. Through Sprouts came Sarah, and through Sarah, a marketplace of neighbors and makers—a chain reaction of grace and growth.
It’s a living illustration of the park’s core idea: when life is given room to flourish, it keeps creating more life. Asphalt becomes soil. Soil becomes habitat. Habitat becomes community. One act of faith becomes many.
That is the story of Charis Park—an experiment in regeneration, belonging, and generosity, where grace works quietly beneath the surface, transforming what once seemed lifeless into something teeming with possibility.
And for those who have asked, What does Charis mean? It’s the Greek word for grace—the infinite love and goodness freely given, what Richard Rohr calls “the force that fills all the gaps of the universe without discrimination or preference.”
I hope you can see the grace at the center of this story—and maybe, see it taking root in your own.
—Taylor
Coming Up…
Daily, NYX Yoga & Fitness
Daily, One Another Coffee
Wednesdays, 11 AM - 1:30 PM, Open Studio Painting, The Art Room
Wednesdays, Mission Compost Pick Up
Thursdays-Sundays, Scott’s Pizza, Charis Park
Saturday, Oct. 25th, 9 AM - 1 PM, El Mercado + Anniversary Gathering for Charis Park
Every Sunday, Worship at 9 AM and 11 AM, Sunset Ridge Church
Event Rentals - Interested in hosting your event at Charis Park or in our facilities? Please email rentals@sunset-ridge.org
Community Partners: For updated schedules and events please follow One Another Coffee, Sunset Ridge Farmers Market, NYX Wellness, Scott’s Pizza, Mission Compost, Sprouts School, Good Acres, and Community First Food Pantry.
Inhale: May I have eyes to see…
Exhale: …the good that is waiting to be unearthed.
