You're Beautiful With Brian Trust: Ft. Tammy Iskarous!
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ALTON - On a recent episode of “You’re Beautiful” with Brian Trust, Tammy Iskarous shared how her faith journey inspired her to start Riverbend Family Ministries.
Based in Wood River, Riverbend Family Ministries provides resources for nonprofits to work together and help families affected by violence, homelessness, substance use and more. Iskarous explained that she developed the idea for RFM after realizing that people could do more to help others if they collaborated.
“I knew people who were doing some super great things. But they were doing it at home. They were doing it in the basement on the ping pong table. And they just couldn’t expand because they didn’t have the resources to do that,” she remembered. “I thought, ‘What if we put all of those together under one roof, share the overhead, share the space, share the things that make it almost impossible for people to do the good work?’”
To provide holistic services for clients, RFM works with several partners, including Amare, Metro East Every Survivor Counts and CASA of Southwestern Illinois. They have expanded quite a bit since Iskarous made the decision to start the organization in 2007.
But the decision wasn’t an easy one. Iskarous recalls standing in Egypt with her feet in the Red Sea, praying over whether or not to take a leap of faith. She said she heard God’s voice telling her that it was time to “step out of the boat” and start the work on RFM.
“At that moment, I knew that God was in every single detail of RFM,” she said. “I knew this had to be totally of God or it wouldn’t work. It just wouldn’t work.”
Nowadays, RFM is thriving, and Iskarous’s faith is as strong as ever. But she recognizes it isn’t always easy to obey God.
While obedience can vary at times, Iskarous encourages people to never lose their faith. She believes God will always find you, and there is joy and peace in obeying Him.
“He’s relentless in His pursuit of us,” she explained. “And that doesn’t mean you don’t want to throat-punch people every once in a while. That doesn’t mean that that joy is giddy and always, because there are days that are just hard, and there are days that you just think, ‘I can’t walk another step. I am overwhelmed. I can’t do this.’ But there is a joy like that bubbling stream that’s just always there that you can plant your feet in, and there’s a peace, the Bible says, that passes anything that we could ever understand.”
Faith is a central part of what Iskarous does, and she puts her all into RFM. So far, they have served over 5,000 families in Madison County this year. She encourages people to reach out to RFM to learn more about the organization and how it can help you.
“I want you to know that you are going to be met with a group of people that leave their judgements and their bias at the door, because most of us have walked right alongside you,” she said. “A lot of us have the same struggles. We have grown up in the same families of crisis or families of addiction or families of homelessness. We see you. We will lean in and hear your story. We will wrap around you and say, ‘You matter. You absolutely matter.’”
For more information about Riverbend Family Ministries, visit RiverbendFamilyMinistries.com. Watch or listen to “You’re Beautiful” at 2 p.m. on Thursdays at RiverBender.com/Beautiful.
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