Renee Alvarez · June 2026

What we learned planting Franklin

We launched with forty people in leased office space that smelled faintly of carpet glue. Four years on there are about 350 of us. Three things I'd tell anyone doing this.

Send your best people, not your spare ones. Berry Hill gave up four community group leaders and a worship leader to make this work. It cost them something real, and it is the only reason we made it.

Don't recreate the mothership. We spent a year trying to run every program Berry Hill runs with a tenth of the volunteers. Now we do three things well and send people up the interstate for the rest.

The drive is a feature. Nobody drives twenty-five minutes to a room they feel anonymous in. People who came here came for each other.