As executive director of Community on the Rise, a nonprofit and social enterprise dedicated to empowering the unhoused in Birmingham, Ala., Avery Rhodes is all too familiar with the perceptions that some people have of women who are experiencing homelessness.
“You know the stereotypes or the narrative that exists around the women I’m working with,” she said. “It’s one of pity or that they’re draining resources.”
But she’s on a mission to rewrite this story.
“Women survivors are literally changing recycling infrastructure in Birmingham, and that is flipping the narrative on its head,” Rhodes said.
Community on the Rise is giving plastics and people a second chance as the only nonprofit in Alabama recycling #5PP plastics and remaking them into beautiful, purpose-driven, and earth-friendly goods. The products are made by survivors of homelessness.
While working for Community on the Rise, team members receive free housing, therapy, a practical life skills curriculum, and paid employment. It’s all part of the organization’s program called WHOLE — Wellness & Housing Opportunity Linked to Employment, a comprehensive housing, employment, development, and support program for women survivors of homelessness.
In spring 2025, the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham awarded Community on the Rise $35,000 to help support the WHOLE program. The grant is being used to upgrade the organization’s recycling equipment. Rhodes participated in our Fall 2025 Giving Together luncheon and panel discussion at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Watch our video highlighting grant-funded projects happening at the museum, Community on the Rise, and Girls Rock Birmingham.
“We recycle number five, polypropylene plastic, and that is a very common plastic resin that you find in kitchen products, microwavable containers, take-out containers from restaurants, plastic Starbucks cups, pill bottles, peanut butter lids, kitty litter buckets,” she explained. “But because number five is not recycled in most neighborhood bins, or generally in Birmingham, it falls into this gap and creates a lot of waste. We’ve stepped into that gap and made recycling number five our emphasis in our justice enterprise.”
The new recycling machines are not only of higher quality but are also easier to use for women with mobility and other physical limitations.
“It’s going to be more inclusive of women with varying abilities, and we’re going to be able to make more products,” Rhodes said.
“It just wasn’t enough anymore.”
Rhodes first began working with Birmingham’s homeless community as a volunteer at Church of the Reconciler.
“I was just serving breakfast one day a week,” she said.
But over time, she began to build relationships with the people she served each week. She learned about what was going on in their lives, including “the endless spiral of things that kept them from being able to move forward,” she said.
A missed court date – that a person might be unaware of because they have no home and no way to receive mail – would result in a fine that couldn’t be paid or even an arrest warrant.
“I was just compelled at that point to do more of my own research about poverty and homelessness and learn what causes this, why it’s such a cycle, why it’s so hard to break,” Rhodes said. “And in doing that and learning about the various traps that people end up not being able to escape, I really wanted to do something to build infrastructure to help people move forward. I loved the serving opportunity, but it just wasn’t enough anymore.”
She attended countless workshops and visited places like Thistle Farms in Nashville, Tennessee, which uses the social enterprise model to help women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction.
One Woman’s Story
Rhodes founded Community on the Rise in 2020. In 2024, CBS42 named her Remarkable Woman of the Year, and she’s a recipient of the Louise Branscomb Barrier Breaker Award, which recognizes leaders in the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church who advocate for women and marginalized communities.
But Rhodes doesn’t do this work for accolades. She does it for women like JoAnn.
JoAnn came to Alabama, fleeing an abusive and violent environment in Texas.
In early 2021, she signed on as the first woman to join the then brand-new WHOLE Program, which is a two-year program, focusing first on helping women feel safe, secure, and stable, and then striving to develop leadership skills. (Community on the Rise has also recently launched a path to homeownership program that will allow eligible participants to rent to own a house.)
When JoAnn joined the program, she felt worthless. And she hadn’t driven in about 20 years, afraid to get on the road – especially the interstate. Now, she’s a confident leader among other women in the program and serves as the driver taking participants to work and doctor appointments.
Rhodes vividly recalls the day a woman escaping domestic abuse showed up at Community on the Rise, desperate for help. She watched JoAnn comfort the woman and connect her with a women’s shelter and other resources.
“I saw JoAnn reach over and place her hand on top of this woman’s hand, and she said, ‘This is not your fault. None of this was ever your fault. You are safe.’ And that just touched me so deeply,” Rhodes said, adding that her goal is for the WHOLE program to become an initiative led by women survivors of homelessness.
“It was like seeing this ripple effect in real life of what it means when a woman begins to heal and believe in herself again, and JoAnn is one example of what I see over and over again,” Rhodes said, “which is women almost immediately taking their own healing and turning around and sharing it with somebody else.”
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