The same heart, at home and seven thousand miles away
As a company, Friends Home Care and Hospice supports local ministries and international missionaries. Caregiving does not clock out, and it has never once stopped at the county line.
Serving our neighbors
A message from Bert Knapp, founder of Thugging to Loving Thugging to Loving
Boots on the ground, every week
Every Saturday morning, we are boots on the ground with Thugging to Loving, a Des Moines outreach that goes into the homeless camps and provides for people’s daily needs. Not once a year at the holidays. Every week.
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Central Iowa Shelter & Services
Two to three times a month, we serve at the downtown homeless shelter with our church group. We have also donated equipment the shelter needed.
They do not go to watch. They go to work.
Melissa and her husband, Scott Buchanan, travel to Central America — especially El Salvador — as missionaries through their church, New Hope Assembly of God, working with King’s Castle Ministries.
Many patients have never seen a doctor in their lives. They arrive with diabetes, high blood pressure, and failing hearts, and they leave with medicine and with someone who prayed over them first. The teams carry supplies down for the clinics and the local hospitals, and share the Gospel in the barrios and the cities — until all the kids know Jesus. The goal has always been the same: healing, body and soul.
Scott leads construction crews
He does not go to watch. He goes to work — building alongside the communities they serve.
Melissa has led medical teams
She has worked the pharmacy at a free clinic staffed by volunteer doctors, where patients walk for miles — sometimes a mile up a mountain — to be seen.
A home rebuilt after an earthquake
Friends Home Care paid to rebuild one very poor family's uninhabitable house. The new one gave them running water and an indoor bathroom for the first time in their lives.
Livestock & missionary students
They provide livestock so families can feed themselves long after the plane goes home, and help fund missionary students onto the field in their third year of schooling.
Businesses that keep giving
Friends Home Care invested in a taco stand business and helped start a coffee shop at King’s Castle Ministries. Small businesses like these keep providing long after the plane goes home.
King’s Castle Ministries
Friends Home Care supports the work of King’s Castle Ministries in El Salvador. You can give in tribute to someone you love.
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What our support means to their ministry
Erick and Iveth, missionaries now serving in Côte d’Ivoire Heidi, a missionary from Nicaragua serving in Honduras Yonatan and Maggie, serving at King’s Castle The church we paid to build
In 2023, Melissa led a medical team into a barrio in San Sebastian that is primarily voodoo and had no Christian church. Friends Home Care gave the money for an Assembly of God church to be built there, and Melissa and Scott have gone down to help build it.
$214,000
Given to ministries since 2023.
Most home care companies take their profit and keep it. Friends Home Care sends it to the mission field.
So when your family hires Friends Home Care, two things happen. Someone you love gets cared for at home, and the help keeps moving — from a homeless camp on the south side to a clinic on a mountainside.
The work keeps multiplying
Farther out
Melissa hopes to go beyond El Salvador one day — to Africa, to help drill water wells. She has said she is open to wherever the work leads.
Because it is the same instinct
A caregiver does not stop being a caregiver when the shift ends or the plane lands. If someone is hurting in front of you, you help.
That is what happens in a living room in Ankeny at two in the morning, in a homeless camp on a Saturday morning, and in a clinic at the top of a hill in El Salvador. The families we serve in Iowa are the reason all of it is possible.
Care for your family. Help for someone else’s.
Tell us what your loved one needs, and we will help you find the right care.