Our story

In 2011, founder Jeremy Aranda reflected with his brother and father on the uphill battle nonprofits faced in creating impact in their local communities. They observed many nonprofits struggled to measure their work and were often taken advantage of by vendors as they sought to grow and develop. Nonprofits often had minimal budgets, small staffs, outdated technology, and little competent outside support. Their discussion led them to found Mission Matters Group to provide high-quality technology, operational, and management consulting services to nonprofits. At MMG, Jeremy immersed himself in serving nonprofits of all sizes and missions, and the experience was eye opening.

In 2019, Jeremy left MMG to take a full-time role with one of his clients. As a member of the organization’s executive team, his duties included refining programs, redesigning staffing models, refining success metrics, managing government contracts, building relationships, and developing long-term strategy. During this time, Jeremy met and collaborated with Colin LeCroy.

In 2016, Colin, a former corporate attorney, joined the staff of a nonprofit that specialized in crisis counseling. During his time, Colin architected and secured funding for a virtual counseling and services model that has helped thousands of women in Texas negotiate crisis situations. He has also authored, and continues to lobby for, legislation designed to increase access to crisis care.

Yet, after having the opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews with the organization’s caregivers, Colin began to see how much more is needed beyond the initial intervention. Clients may navigate a crisis, but if the fundamentals of their situation had not changed, they were apt to fall right back into a crisis weeks or months later. But a nonprofit’s budget and caseload constraints made it impossible for the organization’s staff to offer the deeply personal, long-term care that was needed to help an individual transition from entrenched instability and serial crises to long-term stability. Colin recognized the need for a new model.

Working together, Jeremy and Colin began discussing with several other nonprofit leaders how nonprofits could support long-term, personal transformation. They agreed on several principles:

• Christians are individually called to serve our neighbors in a way that affirms their dignity, establishes God’s kingdom, and brings peace to their community.
• This service should go beyond an initial crisis response to offer an individual or family the opportunity to build a life consistent with God’s design in which they are free of fear and shame and able to flourish.
• One requisite to escaping inter-generational poverty is developing a set of habits, virtues, and values that support success, and these traits can only be learned in the context of a trusted, long-term, and purposeful relationship with someone who already understands those traits.
• Bureaucratic programs depersonalize care, and transactional social services alone do not enable the relationships that are essential to escaping inter-generational poverty.
• The Church has the human resources to carry out its mission, but it needs help mobilizing them in the service of at-risk families.
• Christians are called to selfless excellence in the service of their neighbors. The Church—individual churches, parachurch ministries, and individual Christians—can do more if they collaborate.

Life on Belay launched in 2020 to pursue this mission. With a collective of talented and experienced leaders with diverse relationships across the nonprofit space, it is committed helping nonprofits, churches, and individuals serve their neighbors and strengthen their communities.