Realtor Necia Freeman.
Photo by Rebecca
Kiger/Netflix.
Necia Freeman, a realtor for Old
Colony Realtors, is a lifelong West Vir-
ginian and Cabell County resident. She
helped start the Backpacks and Brown
Bags outreach in 2010 with the original
intention of serving the residents within
a 1-mile radius of 20th Street in Hun-
tington, which included Spring Hill El-
ementary School. The group’s first action
was packing brown bags of food for stu-
dents who weren’t getting enough to eat
on the weekends.
While the youth group at Lewis Me-
morial Baptist Church has since taken
over the backpack part of the ministry,
for Freeman, serving these children was
the first step in a long journey in loving
her Huntington neighbors. The second
step came in 2011 when she read a story
in the newspaper about a woman who
was found murdered 40 minutes from
Huntington. The article stated that the
woman was a known prostitute who had
been shot.
“And that was the end of the story,”
Freeman says of the article. “It bothered
me. I needed back story. I kept waiting
for something, but nothing came about.
Did she have kids? Was she a mom? A
sister? It just seemed like nobody cared.”
About a week later, Freeman found out
the deceased woman was the mother of
one of the Spring Hill Elementary students
the backpack ministry served.
“We had been trying to reach these
kids, trying to show them Christ through
food, but I realized if we were really going
to change their lives here on earth, we
were going to have to reach their moth-
ers,” she says.
That’s when Freeman became consumed
with a new goal: taking the brown bag
lunches to the streets. This new street
ministry launched in November 2011.
Necia Freeman
A Boots-on-the-Ground Ministry
That first week, she prepared 12 brown
bags to hand out.
“I thought, I’ll start friendships with
these women and help them find Jesus.
Then they’ll detox, go to rehab, and their
lives and their kids’ lives will change—all
because I gave them a brown bag lunch,”
she recalls. “It didn’t happen that way. I
had no experience with prostitution before
this, but I’m a realtor, so I suspicioned
that I knew where they were. We ended
up being led to Sixth Avenue in Hunting-
ton, which we now call Brown Bag Bou-
levard. That’s where we met the majority
of the women we serve. Now we go once
a week. It hasn’t been simple, but it’s been
really cool. The Lord’s plans are always
much more intriguing than my own.”
The brown bags are filled with snacks
and include a card with a special phone
number the girls can call if they need
help. “The card just says we don’t want
anything from you, God loves you, and
we’re here if you need us,” says Freeman.
“For us to give them
a choice, we have to
give them hope, and
we have to show them
what that is because
they don’t even know
what hope looks like.”
Along the way, Freeman was intro-
duced to a world she had never known.
She learned to navigate the criminal jus-
tice system and started visiting the girls
in jail. As the ministry grew, more and
more people wanted to help.
“One of my friends at church wanted
to help, so I asked her if she wanted to
write letters to the girls who were in jail,”
says Freeman. “Now every girl gets a
handwritten letter within 24 hours of her
arrest. Some of the girls h