For Alan Graham, it is all about his relationships — with God, his family, staff members and certainly the homeless men and women he regularly engages on the streets of our community.
Alan is the founder and CEO of Mobile Loaves & Fishes. MLF is a social outreach ministry committed to providing permanent, sustainable solutions for the chronically homeless while surrounding them with compassion, love and dignity. Those who know Alan best know that he is a man on a mission — to relieve the struggles homeless individuals face in obtaining their basic needs of food, community and a place to call home.
Since its founding in 1998, Mobile Loaves & Fishes volunteers have served more than 6 million meals with a side of hope to homeless men and women living on the streets of Austin. The organization has also spawned similar food truck ministries in other cities across the U.S. With the support of more than 20,000 volunteers, Mobile Loaves & Fishes is the largest prepared feeding program to the homeless and working poor in Austin, Texas. Graham is also the visionary behind MLF’s Community First! Village — a 51-acre master planned development that provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community to the chronically homeless in Central Texas.
While many Mobile Loaves & Fishes volunteers describe their experience as life changing, the organization’s mission to serve the homeless has perhaps changed no one more than Alan Graham himself. Previously a real estate investor and developer, Alan founded Trilogy Development and the Lynxs Group, which developed Austin’s airport cargo facility and similar facilities at airports around the country.
Around the same time, Alan had the seed of the idea for Mobile Loaves & Fishes. He and the other founders started by making sack lunches and serving them from the back of a green minivan. Alan readily admits that their original paradigm of serving the homeless had some flaws, but with the help of a formerly homeless man, Houston Flake, they perfected the model that MLF successfully uses today.
Alan and his wife, Tricia Graham, were married in September 1984 and have four children of their own and a niece that they raised as well. They welcomed their first grandchild in April 2022! Alan is a published author of the book Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home.