Built Together: Striving to create deeper impact with each day

On August 5, 2025, I hit one year as Executive Director of Make-A-Day. I marked it the same way I mark most milestones here: in the middle of a full week, with a lot still on my mind. We are going to cover a year that I am genuinely proud of. Not because everything went smoothly. It didn't. But because through all of it, we never lost the thing that matters most: we stayed rooted in dignity and in community. That is how Make-A-Day was founded. That is still who we are.

What has changed is the depth.

A lot of people in Columbus know us as the burgers and haircuts people. That still makes me smile because it's true and it means something (also, have you had one of our burgers? Genuinely the best). We show up. We feed people. We take care of people. But what we've built around that meal and that haircut has grown into something we couldn't have described two years ago. We serve meals now that are crafted alongside the communities we're in, such as the meal developed with the Somali community in mind, because dignity means more than showing up with food. It means showing up with attention. And alongside that meal comes a care team that is actively working to understand the barriers a person is carrying and chip away at them, one step at a time, toward something that looks like stability.

That is Every Day, Deeper. Not a rebrand but what we built, together over the last few years.

We built it while carrying a real worry. Federal relief funding that sustained outreach work across this region ended in 2025. For us, that meant uncertainty about whether we could maintain the small but mighty team that makes all of this possible. I think about the increasing population of older adults experiencing homelessness, the neighbors who are easy to overlook, the guests who have come to rely on us showing up in their neighborhood with consistency and care. I did not want what we built for them to come undone because the funding landscape shifted.

So we got to work on sustainability the same way we get to work on everything else: together. We closed out our ARPA funding responsibly. We secured and renewed grants. We launched 100 Investors in Hope to build a community-powered funding base. We developed a strategic plan that is honest about where we are and clear about where we're going. We are building toward the future with intention.

What steadied us most was not a grant; it was the people. The volunteers who keep showing up and bringing everyone they know with them. The library staff who went looking for haircuts and ended up helping us launch a justice initiative. The guests who came back, and then came back again.

That is what this is about. Not just what we did in 2025, but what it means to go deeper every day in service of the people who deserve it most.

We are glad you are here with us.

Christy Hayes, Executive Director

View Make-A-Day's full 2025 Impact Report