A few years ago Micah Melnick was just an ordinary college student with a desire that changed everything: to serve the people who needed her.
Melnick is the founder and executive director of BigHouse Foundation, a Christ-centered nonprofit organization created to meet the needs of foster children in Lee County.
Melnick was exposed to the foster care system when her parents took in four foster children during her junior year of college.
"It was overwhelming at first with four," Melnick said. "They were just kind of thrown in the deep end. They had friends that would help with tutoring, babysitting and hand-me-downs."
Melnick saw that people wanted to help when there was a tangible way to contribute. She realized many don't help because they don't know what is needed.
The idea to form a nonprofit organization came up during a conversation Melnick had with her friend Susannah Jones, now the program director of BigHouse.
"We were talking about how foster kids don't get to do extra stuff like yearbooks, prom and trips to the beach," Jones said. "We were saying there needed to be something like a Make-A-Wish for foster kids. It was out of that that Micah came up with the idea."
Melnick said she feels one of the biggest challenges foster families face is clothing their children, so in 2008 she opened a clothes closet in donated office space in Opelika.
In February 2009 the clothes closet officially became BigHouse Inc. She and her husband graduated in May of that year and returned to Opelika to develop the organization.
They wanted to do more than offer free clothing for foster kids, and they found just what they needed to achieve that goal: a big house. They opened it in March 2010.
Now BigHouse is a place where foster children can come to get clothing, help with schoolwork or just enjoy BigHouse's dance, music and game rooms. They can also come to special events like Kids Night Out, summer camps and family beach trips.
"It's a very long process, starting an organization, but because she saw the vision for it, that enabled her to put this together," said Blake Melnick, Micah's husband. "It was a lot of hard work, but because of the passion she has for foster children, she was willing to put in the time and effort to start this."
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