Today we’d like to introduce you to Dustin & Christina Hite.
Hi Dustin & Christina, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
For the last two decades, we’ve found ways to walk alongside those on the margins. We sort of stumbled into this lifestyle in graduate school, when we lived in an affordable apartment complex full of young families who were working hard to make ends meet.
We quickly got to know a few of our neighbors, and after hours of classes, reading, discussing, and learning about the best approaches to ministry, we were feeling antsy to actually DO something. After looking around our context, we realized we had a perfect spot to show up – right in our own neighborhood.
With a group of five of our closest friends, we started spending our evenings intentionally putting together really simple activities for the kids (of which there were MANY). We played countless games of capture the flag, spent summer Saturdays at the swimming pool, organized scavenger hunts and “Survivor” nights, served hundreds of popsicles, and went through so many containers of animal crackers. We attended their activities to cheer them on, and got to know all of their families. We shared snacks and stories and spent the better part of three years showing up twice a week as “the college kids.” It was a sweet time of community building with our best friends and these kiddos.
Soon after, we began working in the church world, finding ways to serve in the cities we were in, first Tulsa, Oklahoma, then Peoria, Illinois. Through those churches, we learned so much about privilege, solidarity, equity, justice, the barriers in our broken systems, and so much more. Primarily, we walked alongside those navigating the child welfare system and folks experiencing homelessness. We also became foster parents, and the first two little girls who were placed in our home became our forever daughters through adoption.
In 2020, after several years in Peoria, our path led our family of four to Austin, Texas, where we became residents at Community First! Village living in a tiny home as intentional neighbors alongside hundreds of folks recovering from chronic homelessness. Our days were lively and life-giving, filled with everything from helping someone get their Social Security card to serving coffee and pancakes from our deck to singing a duet during open mic night. We took neighbors to medical appointments, pet-sat while folks were traveling, and sat bedside as neighbors took their final breath. We spent thousands of hours just building relationships, doing everything we could to create felt safety so that people who had been through so much could let their guards down and settle in. We played pickleball with folks of all abilities, led the on-site church service on Sunday evenings, supported friends who made the brave step of starting recovery, and helped other intentional neighbors integrate into the neighborhood.
During that time, we also launched a non-profit, A Faithful Presence, with a mission of co-creating environments of healing and belonging by neighboring well. Through trauma-informed advocacy, community building, and holistic spiritual care, we were invited into the lives of so many people who completely changed how we saw the world.
In late 2025, after five years of living alongside the best neighbors, our time at the village ended. Today, we continue to lead A Faithful Presence, still leaning into those three areas and now helping other communities and organizations serving those on the margins do the same through our coaching and consulting.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Of course, the last 20 years haven’t always been smooth! We have always been pulled into places that are packed with people, and people are beautiful and messy and, well, human.
From the early days of helping those young tweens navigate growing up while we played kickball together, to sitting with neighbors who navigated 30 years unhoused, to walking alongside foster parents who are doing their best to navigate the trauma their little ones are carrying, being invited into people’s lives is an honor that is filled with complexities.
But along the way, the most difficult seasons for us have actually been marked by the messiness of leadership. Neighboring has come pretty naturally and has a reciprocity that fuels itself. It’s not a one-way street. There is a genuine give-and-take that is baked into being a good neighbor. We’ve been taken care of just as much as we’ve done the caring.
The trickiest situations have been handling behind-the-scenes struggles among those of us with “power”. Sometimes, those who are steering the ships toward solutions, without even realizing it, create new broken systems. In our truest attempts to improve the old ones, people still fall through the cracks, and the suffering continues.
And we have not been immune to this tendency. It can be simpler to push people through a new system than to sit with someone in the honesty of their human story. It can seem more “efficient” to create a process for progress than to walk with someone on a path that’s still marked by pain.
Our hope is that when we get it wrong, we own it and try again. We keep doing our best to listen and learn and share power. We ask questions with genuine curiosity and believe people when they tell us what they need, want, and love. So as the obstacles continue to come, and they will, we rely on that approach to see us through.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are proud to be co-founders of A Faithful Presence, an organization that co-creates environments of healing and belonging by neighboring well.
We center folks on the margins through community building, trauma-informed advocacy, and holistic spiritual care, and we strengthen the communities that walk with them through coaching and consulting. We primarily walk alongside folks who are currently or have formerly experienced homelessness.
Our work is slow, relational, and shaped by mutuality and lived experience. We do our best to share power, stay in close proximity, and maintain a posture of curiosity and humility. Everyone in the room has something to bring to the table, and folks who have walked the road themselves are our best leaders and teachers.
What matters most to you? Why?
While we have had many formative relationships and experiences in the last 20 years, our biggest motivators have been our daughters, who entered our home through foster care and are now our forever daughters through adoption.
Parenting is difficult, and parenting children who have been through the child welfare system adds additional complexities.
Family separation, early childhood adversity, and generational cycles of adversity are part of our daughters’ stories (which are only theirs to tell).
But parenting shaped us in unimaginable ways. We’ve done our best to learn, grow, and understand what trauma can do to a developing brain. We’ve also made countless mistakes, modeled repair over and over again, and together, created a family built on felt safety, connection, and belonging.
The truth is, harm happens in relationships, but so does healing.
Our parenting journey led us to examine who we are and the privilege we’ve had (and still have). We see the system failures: from child welfare to the justice system to systemic racism and cycles of trauma that continue because we’ve perpetuated these failing systems. And we see the relational failures of a society that tries to create systems that can never be substitutes for belonging.
Now, when a friend of ours who is 60 years old, recently housed, and healing from decades of trauma, we have a little more understanding. When she describes her life as a child with no safe family, on the streets by 13, figuring out how to make it without a single emergency contact, our perspective is clearer.
And we feel compelled to do our part. We want to do for one what we wish we could do for everyone. So we widen the circle of family and keep building the belonging we all need.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.afaithfulpresence.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afaithfulpresence/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/afaithfulpresence
