Trellis International

The mission of Trellis is to facilitate collaboration that helps resolve a city's greatest challenges.

Trellis emerged out of a group that was praying together for the city of Costa Mesa for 15 years. In 2011, the group determined that it was time to not only pray together, but also start working together. As they started doing that, a simple structure emerged to accomplish the mission of "facilitating collaboration around the relational, spiritual and practical challenges in a city." Regular connections and ongoing relationships between churches, city leaders, businesses and nonprofits are the key to making this work.

We facilitate pastors' lunches, quarterly city leaders' gatherings, an annual "Love Our City" campaign and ongoing engagement activity around four initiatives: neighboring, education, homelessness and prayer.

Trellis became a nonprofit in 2013, while still being run completely by volunteers. In the fall of 2015, we hired our first employee, Ian Stevenson, as the Executive Director. Since then, we have continued to grow and have impacted hundreds of homeless seeing them get into housing. We have seen every school in our city benefit from partnerships with at least one church and have helped engage other organizations in our community. We have connected over 1,500 neighbors to projects throughout the community and continue to see an increasing level of prayer and hope growing in Costa Mesa.

As a result of our efforts in Costa Mesa, we have had the opportunity to help and encourage other cities in their collective efforts and are striving to take the things we've learned and developed along the way and share them with others.

Our vision is to see as many cities as possible have a city-centric movement taking place in them. We envision loving your neighbors, impacting the next generation, prayer and making a measurable difference on the greatest practical challenge that each city identifies being intentionally and consistently pursued through effective collaborative leadership and networking.

In every city there are a variety of entities all working to make a difference in their community. Churches, nonprofits, businesses, and government agencies are all doing good work and making an impact at some level. However, most of the time, these entities work siloed from each other. This results in duplication of work, ineffective outreaches, and each entity only knowing what their work is doing, but not necessarily what the results may be in the larger community. In Costa Mesa, Trellis came in to provide focus, organization and communication for a collaborative approach to the city's greatest spiritual, relational and practical challenges. The result of this work has been that over 500 individuals have ended their homelessness since 2015. Every public school has a church partner that supports that particular school's needs. Nonprofits with shared missions have collaborated on projects, drives and case work, making their work more effective. Over 1,100 volunteers come together on a city-wide serve day each year doing more than 80 projects to serve the community at large. City agencies have volunteer resources to call on when extra help is needed to accomplish large community projects. Pastors and community leaders meet quarterly to network and discuss issues effecting the city. The city has a united prayer effort to specifically pray for the city and leads three unified prayer events each year. Trellis creates a structure that has allowed all of this to happen and because we are committed for the long haul, this collaboration will not die out; we will continue to be better together.

1. Community Impact Team Project Sponsorships
Sponsorship for projects that would be done in the context of our Transitional Workprogram designed to hep people experienciing homelessness or home insecurity to transition into regular jobs and establish housing security. Some examples include things like helping maintain a city park, power-washing, helping an elderly couple with yardwork, or street clean up in a neighborhood.
$60 sponsor 1 homeless person for 1 project or sponsor a team of 4 for $240

2. An extended cab pick up truck for the CIT team to get them to projects.

3. Teacher Appreciation gift bags in early May

3. Business or corporate sponsorships for our Love Costa Mesa Day on May 18, 2024 or Love Our Schools Day on November 2, 2024

4. Business or corporate sponsorships for a CAFE (Community and Family Engagement) event to support the strategic goals of a specific school

Up until 2020, we primarily served in the city of Costa Mesa. In 2021, we started going beyond our city to help stimulate city-centric movements in other cities in Orange County. We have started a cohort of city leaders in Orange, Fullerton, Anaheim, Huntington Beach and Irvine. Currently we are investing in the cities of Huntington Beach, Orange and Irvine.

At Trellis, we believe every city has things to celebrate as well as challenges to overcome. The best way to address both sides of this coin is to facilitate a more collaborative ethos in the city context. As leadership in every arena, public, private and faith-based come and go, establishing a structure that facilitates ongoing focus, strategy, organization and communication makes a huge difference. We have seen the value and rewards of collaboration impacting issues like homelessness and food insecurity. An intentional approach to collaborating around neighboring has impacted the whole city with projects, relationships and neighbors being more cared for. Engaging the community more collectively in our schools is impacting the next generation and bringing our faith community together to build relationships and pray, is no doubt impacting more than we can see. Our team is committed to stimulating, encouraging and supporting sustainable city-centric movements. We value prayer, unity, dignity efficacy and perseverance. Our goal is to see measurable results from the collaboration we facilitate and to include as much of the community as possible because we truly believe "we are better together."