Community on the Rise

The gang’s all here! 🎄♻️

Are you ready for our 2026 artisan recycled holiday ornaments?! ✨

• Butterfly 🦋
• Vintage🛷
• Gingerbread🎄
• Bumblebee 🐝
• Flowers 🌸
• Fish 🐟
• Star ⭐️
• Heart ❤️
• Dino 🦖

Every single one is handcrafted in Birmingham from locally rescued #5 plastic, which means no two are ever exactly alike. Different colors, different swirls, different little personalities. Some gorgeous. Some wonderfully weird. All one-of-a-kind.

And every purchase supports paid employment for women survivors of homelessness & exploitation through our recycling justice enterprise.

Plastic rescued. Women employed. Skills built. Leaders growing. Christmas made considerably cooler. 🎄♻️

And YES, there will be many, many ornament posts to come.

https://youtu.be/Ypkjozp8tZY?si=ok3-Ot8W2_lglRP0

We talk a lot about making sure survivor voices have a seat at the table. Well, pull up a chair. ❤️‍🔥

Michelle Roberts knows firsthand what it means to experience homelessness and uncertainty, and what it means to have people show up beside you when you need them most.

Today, she’s bringing that lived experience to the other side of the table: asking the questions, leading the conversation, and using her voice to help shape how Birmingham thinks about homelessness, community, and what it means to truly show up for one another.

🎥 Welcome to Empowering Birmingham Through Their Eyes, a new series created and hosted by Michelle as her leadership project during Year Two of our WHOLE program.

The idea of hers comes from something deeply personal.

Michelle has never forgotten the people who showed up for her when she needed support most. She created this series to turn that gratitude outward, celebrating the leaders and trailblazers who are showing up for people across Birmingham and helping make our city stronger, healthier, and kinder.

And she chose one heck of a woman for Episode One. 🔥

Alanah Melton, Birmingham’s Director of Unhoused Strategies, is helping lead our city’s response to homelessness with the kind of work that requires both big-picture thinking and a willingness to stay close to the people affected by it. A longtime champion of Birmingham’s nonprofit community and a 2025 Next City Vanguard, Alanah has built her work around collaboration, compassion, and creating solutions that actually work for people.

There is something pretty extraordinary about this interview.

One woman is helping shape Birmingham’s response to homelessness.

The other has lived it. And now she’s helping shape the conversation!

This is what can happen when people get a real chance to share their voice and ideas.

And listen, we KNOW nine minutes is a big ask in a world of 15-second videos. 😂 But watching Michelle step into this role and hearing these two women talk about the future of our city?

These nine minutes are worth your time. 🧡

This is the opportunity we want to keep building: lived experience alongside leadership, shaping what comes next. Michelle Roberts Community On The Rise

Empowering Birmingham Through Their Eyes Empowering Birmingham Through Their Eyes is created and hosted by C...

We 💜 when our friends from Protective Life Insurance Co. spend time with us in the workshop!

There’s ALWAYS plenty to do in our recycling justice enterprise, and extra hands make a real difference for our small team. ♻️ Sorting, shredding, prepping, making, packing…our volunteers help us keep Birmingham’s #5 plastic moving out of the waste stream and into something new.

And they get to learn a little about the people, purpose & process behind it all while they’re here.

Have a team that would like to serve + learn alongside us? Send us a message! We’d love to get you into the workshop. 💜

It’s time for Bats & Boos! 🦇👻

Our Birmingham Bats & My Boo earrings are perfect for your fall vibes. 🍂

Handcrafted by amazing survivor Lisa, with an assist on the plastics injector from our citizen scientist Mollie, it’s all happening in our downtown Birmingham workshop! Each pair is made with locally recycled #5 plastic from YOU, plus quality brass & stainless steel.

♻️ Plastic rescued from the waste stream
🖐️ Made by hand in Birmingham
🧡 Made by a survivor building a life on her own terms

Cute earrings doing some pretty serious good while reminding the crowd that HALLOWEEN SEASON IS HERE, PEOPLE!! 🦇🎃👻

How do you order?
1. Message us or just click if you’re on Instagram
2. communityontherise.com (customize your color)
3. Visit Birmingham Museum of Art Shop - they’ll be in the store next week!

We 🩵 you forever, Dolly.

Dolly understood something we believe deeply around here: where you begin does not get to decide where you end.

Dolly always made room for humor and heartbreak. Grit and tenderness. Ambition and generosity. And she never seemed to believe that becoming more meant leaving other people behind.

So we made her a little something.

From discarded plastic, transformed into something new.

Just admiring a few of our favorites lately…✨♻️🩷

Three years ago, we took a chance on an old house.

We’re not home renovators. (Though this project certainly taught us a thing or two!) What drew us in was the opportunity to create something much bigger: a safe, beautiful, affordable home where a woman who had survived homelessness could begin building equity, stability, and a future through homeownership.

Living in the midst of an affordable housing crisis often means that homelessness is followed by years of housing uncertainty. A safe, stable place to live is life changing. And ownership? Ownership builds equity. It creates a legacy that can be passed on to future generations.

This July, our first graduate reached an incredible milestone.

She’s officially halfway to owning her home! 🏡🩷

That moment didn’t happen overnight. It took years of hard work, trust, accountability, savings, and determination. She earned every step. We are so proud of her!

And this renovation wasn’t social media magic, either. It took fundraising, grants, skilled builders, generous partners, and a community that believed this dream was worth investing in. We remain deeply grateful to the Holle Foundation, the Birmingham Association of Realtors, SRD Properties, and every person who gave their time, resources, and encouragement to make this possible.

In early 2027, another graduate will walk through her front door and begin her own journey toward homeownership.

And we can’t wait to do it all again. And again. And again.

🤍 If this story gives you hope, please share it. If you’d like to help create the next opportunity, you can donate using the link below. Every gift helps another survivor move from simply having a place to live…to having a place to call her own.

https://donorbox.org/donate-to-community-on-the-rise