NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. (WKBW) — The Word of Life Ministries Community Day of Prayer is a yearly event that aims to bring hope, faith and fun to people of all ages.
Bishop Jesse Scott and event coordinator Kiera Agee spend months preparing for the event.
"It's bringing the community together that Niagara Falls needs so desperately," Bishop Scott said.
"We provide free food games for the children, just the time to fellowship together and just like to be a member of that community and forget about everything else that's going on," Agee said.
The fourth annual Community Day of Prayer was supposed to be held at Gluck Park — in the center of a neighborhood. But that didn't happen.
"This year we were forced to come back to our own property," Bishop Scott said.
He and Agee said they had liability insurance secured for the event, but the city notified them they also needed umbrella insurance about a week before the gathering.
So the event was held at Word of Life Ministries instead on June 22nd.
"[The insurance] is obtainable, but it takes a lot of underwriting to get it so it wasn't enough time to get the insurance to still host the invite," Agee said.
"We could have gotten an advance notice ahead of time or at least letting us know what the changes are. That's a good community relationship with the city. I do plan to go speak with our mayor personally," Bishop Scott said.
7 News reached out to Mayor Robert Restaino's office about this. 7 News was told he wasn't available for an interview and that the ministry was notified of the insurance requirement on May 2nd, but the members say that's just not the case.
"It's just challenging when you're facing this when you're doing something positive for the community," Agee said.
A similar issue also occurred in Niagara Falls when Jacob Fleming, the lead organizer of the Juneteenth celebration, was unable to obtain the necessary approvals from the city and insurance which meant there was no parade, no vendors and no festival at Legends Park.
The prayer event — although not at the scheduled location and on a smaller scale — was still successful in providing hope and faith to the community.
"So though we're disappointed, we did not intend to let this defeat us. We're going to go forward and we're still going to do our event one way or the other," Bishop Scott said.
