grass-roots beginning

Urban Transformation Ministries (UTM) began In the mid-1990s when the principal of Coit Elementary School (now Coit Creative Arts Academy) asked Joel Shaffer to start an after-school program for its students due to the closure of a city-run recreation program that had previously operated in the school. As one of Coit School's neighbors, Joel had been instrumental in several community initiatives. He worked with the neighborhood association and GR vice to help close three drug houses in close proximity to the school, set up a neighborhood watch block club on the school’s block, and supervised Coit’s previous after-school recreation program. 

In 1995, with support from Servants Center, Joel and his wife Sherilyn, along with the help of neighborhood mom "Ms. Cookie" Broden, launched the ROCKET Club (Reaching Our Community Kids, Empowering Them), serving 25-30 at-risk (and high potential) children, most of whom were under-resourced and fatherless. Taking cues from Ms. Cookie and her husband Calvin, Joel and Sherilyn became extended family to many of the students from ROCKET Club. They committed to mentoring these students through adulthood. Along the way, they established partnerships with community organizations and churches such as CampFire USA, which took over the after-school program, Berean Baptist Church-who commissioned Joel and Sherilyn as neighborhood missionaries, and the Sierra Club, which funded outdoor camping experiences for UTM students for over a decade. 

UTM’s Evolution

In 2003, UTM was established as a 501(c)(3) organization, with Joel appointed as its Executive Director. He and Sherilyn continued to mentor their students, many of whom were now in high school. To strengthen long-term mentoring, they introduced various programs, including the ROCK, an age-specific basketball initiative for teens and young adults, where the gospel was shared every week. This open gym format attracted 40 to 80 participants every Saturday night.

As students deepened their faith, UTM launched a Bible study group called Thursday Night Hype. This group became a supportive community for many students from unstable family backgrounds. By 2010, Hype had evolved into a young adult group. Due to the backgrounds of many participants, including former gang members and drug dealers, it proved challenging to integrate them into established neighborhood churches. Therefore, many students from Thursday Night Hype were baptized and became active in three church plants throughout Grand Rapids: New City Church, The Edge Urban Fellowship, and Revolution.

When several young men, mentored by UTM staff and volunteers, left the life of drug dealing and gangs, UTM created the ManUP house. This two-year program helped these young men become spiritually, emotionally, and financially stable. Four of its graduates, including Discipleship Director Davien Fizer, are now married, have steady jobs that pay a living wage, own their own homes, and attend various local churches in the Grand Rapids area. Others who chose to avoid street life without the ManUP house also graduated from college and are flourishing as Christian businessmen and women, social workers, teachers, youth development workers and non-profit leaders throughout West Michigan.

UTM Today

Located in the heart of the South Creston neighborhood of Grand Rapids, UTM programs serve approximately seventy urban youth and young adults, thirty of whom experience life-on-life mentoring relationships with UTM staff and volunteers. Forty percent of UTM’s current staff and volunteers attended UTM programs as teens and were mentored through life-on-life relationships centered around Jesus. UTM programs and the long-term mentoring relationships in Christ have transformed the lives of hundreds of urban youth and families for almost three decades. This could not have happened without the faithful financial support and partnerships from individuals, churches, businesses, and foundations throughout West Michigan.

Our Team

joel and Sherilyn shafFer

Executive Director & Director of Reset House

Joel and Sherilyn are long-time urban ministry veterans, living and serving together for twenty-nine years in the near northeast neighborhoods of Grand Rapids with UTM. For almost three decades as a couple, they’ve mentored and discipled underprivileged and fatherless youth and young adults in their neighborhood, many of whom are serving as leaders in various non-profits, ministries, churches, and businesses throughout West Michigan. Joel serves as the founder and executive director of UTM. He holds a Master of Intercultural Studies from Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and a Bachelor of Music from Cornerstone University. He enjoys playing sports, reading non-fiction, watching football, and playing the keys in open jam sessions with local musicians around Grand Rapids. Sherilyn is the director of the Reset House program and, on occasion, counsels staff, volunteers, and students who grew up within the ministry of UTM. She also serves as an administrative consultant for UTM. She holds a Master of Counseling from Cornerstone University and an Bible/Urban Ministry degree from Moody BIble Institute. She enjoys playing and watching sports, reading, and camping with her family during the summer. Together, Joel and Sherilyn have four adult children, Tiera, Jalen, Ashlyn, and Sahara and a son-in-law, Kyler, who is married to Tiera.

Davien and Rodella Fizer

Discipleship Director and Director of Operations

Davien and Rodella are UTM alumni who were mentored and discipled by Joel and Sherilyn as youth and young adults. As a married couple living in the South Creston neighborhood, they mentor and disciple several disadvantaged youth and young adults, often using their gift of hospitality for students who are fatherless or come from unstable family environments. Davien serves as UTM’s director of discipleship, modeling to volunteers how to mentor and disciple youth through the everyday rhythms of life, including his business ventures (Dave’s Daily Deals). Taking young men fishing is his latest way of doing life-on-life mentoring. He enjoys playing basketball, watching Sparty football and basketball, fishing, and camping throughout the summer with his family. Rodella (Mama Ro) serves as UTM’s Director of Operations and oversees Hype, a youth ministry where high schoolers experience God in the urban context. Rodella also mentors several teen girls and runs Sno-Biz GR, a Shaved-Ice business in West Michigan. She is also being trained to eventually become UTM’s Executive Director in 2026. Rodella also enjoys playing basketball, watching Sparty football and basketball, fishing, and camping through the summer with her family. Davien and Rodella Fizer have four children, BriAysia, Dyimond, Deyonna, Davien Fizer, Jr. (Duece).

Core Practices that Shape UTM

  • Building long-term, life-on-life discipling (mentoring) relationships, teaching them to know their Heavenly Father, finding their new identity in Christ, and raising them as Christian leaders who will remain in the community to live and lead.

  • Helping urban youth and young adults obtain the spiritual, emotional, relational, educational, and economic tools to break the cycle of fatherlessness and become the person God created them to be.

  • Creating social capital through connections to non-profits, mentors, counselors, businessmen/women, churches, city resources, entrepreneurs, and various individuals and businesses that offer resources to help change lives.

  • Equipping individuals, churches, and other organizations to minister to the fatherless and poor through training workshops, seminars, college-level classes, articles, books, blog posts, curriculum, internships, consulting, and urban immersion trips.

Core Practices for doing Christian Community Development

  • Living among the people we serve.

  • Reconciling people to God through the gospel so that they can be reconciled to one another, breaking down racial, social, and economic barriers between peoples.

  • God’s people working for justice in the community utilizing their skills and resources to address the problems of that community alongside their neighbors as they develop jobs, improve schools, create homeownership opportunities, and other enterprises of long-term development.

  • Raising up Indigenous leaders within the community of need who will remain in the community to live and lead.

  • By listening to the community and their felt needs, there is more of a focus on the hopes and dreams of local residents rather than what outsiders think they need. True listening emphasizes the assets, resources, skills, and capacities of neighborhood residents because they know what is needed best for the community.

  • The church is indispensable to effective holistic ministry and Christian Community Development. It is the local gathered body of believers that nurtures its people to form deep relationships of community with one another and grow in their walk with God while saturating their neighborhood with the gospel and making disciples within the community of need. UTM is not a church, but rather looks to support and complement the local church in the transformation process of neighborhood youth and young adults who come from unstable family environments.

  • As humans are spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual beings designed for relationship, ministry among such complex beings must address all aspects of the complex people in the urban communities we serve.

  • Making sure that every aspect of ministry creates opportunity and encourages people to govern their lives without any dependency on charity or the government.