Martin Cominsky, President & CEO of Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, joins host Danielle Holly to share his organization’s messages of volunteerism, community building and respect for other faiths. In addition to providing critical social services and matching a database of over 100,000 volunteers with local nonprofits, Interfaith Ministries is known for having different religious groups convene at each other’s houses of worship and private homes as an intimate, but powerful way to overcome misunderstandings and generalizations and unite the community.
This concept of convening became more relevant than ever when Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017. Martin quickly realized that while there was an engaged public eager to provide in-kind donations, there wasn’t an interagency platform for nonprofits to communicate which specific supplies they needed, in what amounts or when was best to send them. As a result, one organization might have an excess of in-kind donations it didn’t need or couldn’t store, while another was very much in need of those same resources. Martin wanted to find a way to coordinate the sharing of in-kind donations amongst nonprofits and, along with help from Common Impact and a team of Fidelity volunteers, he set out to make Interfaith Ministries that very “community connector” Houston needed both in times of disasters and all year round.
To learn more about Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, visit https://www.imgh.org.
