LEESBURG — The Leesburg District’s Carver Heights Ministries has united seven different denominations under the one goal of changing the lives of children who live in Carver Heights here.

The ministry’s primary focus is an after-school program called “After School Kids Klub.” Thirty neighborhood children receive a warm meal and help with homework and training on computers and social skills, according to Pat Griner, the ministry’s executive director.

“We could bring in 100 kids per day if we just opened the doors,” Griner said. “But we don’t want to just bring them in, but change their lives as we send them out.”

The ministry began two years ago last December as a project of the Leesburg District. Now, it receives funds and volunteers from local Presbyterian, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal churches and the Church of God.

“The people from the community have also begun to volunteer there,” Griner said. “At first they were standoffish…and suspicious because they thought we were trying to start another church. Now, they know we are the Church of Jesus Christ.”

Not all the residents in the predominately African-American neighborhood received the ministry with quiet suspicion, Griner said. “When we started there, they’d ride by and say, ‘Honkey, go home.’ We stayed because this is where God wanted us to be to make a difference.”

Most of the people who live in Carver Heights are in the middle to lower socioeconomic level, but it was not poverty that attracted the district’s attention, but crime, according to Griner.

“The street behind us was drug-infested,” she said. “We would watch drug deals taking place while the children were in the yard playing. The drug dealers have all moved somewhere else, now. I think they got tired of us watching them.”

The goal of the ministry is not just to help children, but to build them up. Liz Arnold, the ministry’s volunteer program director, visits each child at home, Griner said. She gets to know each one’s extended family and looks for ways the ministry can help them.

“She sees what needs are there, to see how we can reach out to help the family to help them help the children,” Griner said. “We’re not there to take care of families, but to enable families to get beyond where they are.”

The after-school program is complemented by a food program that supplements the families’ food budgets to “make it easier for them,” she said. The ministry also provides clothing and school supplies for the children.

Last month, Carver Heights Ministries broke ground on a new building that will house a community medical clinic. It was dedicated to the Rev. Bob and Edy Fox. Bob Fox helped start the ministry while he was superintendent of the Leesburg District.

Griner said the leadership of the ministry wanted Fox, who was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, to “have the joy to know it’s being done in his honor.”

The building will be completed sometime this fall, but Griner said it is already fully staffed with volunteer doctors and nurses from across the country. Griner’s husband, Tom, is the former director of the Florida Conference United Methodist Volunteers in Mission and used his contacts to build a volunteer base.

“We’ve got them [volunteers] ready for the clinic to be ready,” Griner said.