Our Story: Why We Started Shiloh

Some callings arrive like a lightning bolt. Others are more like a seed — planted early, watered slowly, and given years to grow before anyone else can see what's coming.

For Brandon and Ashley Abbott, it was the second kind.

Long before there was a ranch in Swansea or a storefront in the Vista, there was a conviction that wouldn't let go: that every person — regardless of ability — is made in the image of God, and made for more than just being cared for. Made for purpose. Made for belonging.

Even the name carries the conviction. Shiloh is an old word, tucked into Genesis 49:10 — a name that points forward, to a hope not yet fully seen but already promised. It felt like the right name for a community built the same way: standing on a promise, building toward something bigger than what's visible yet.

That promise became Bitty & Beau's in Columbia's Vista, where people with intellectual and developmental disabilities weren't given busy-work — they were given real jobs, real dignity, and real customers who left better for having met them. And it became the Shiloh Abbott Ranch, a working farmstead where residents don't visit a program, they live a life — tending animals, learning trades, and belonging to a family. Today, Shiloh Trading Co. carries that same mission forward, its profits building a resident-benefit endowment designed to outlast any one season of leadership, so what God started here keeps going for generations.

Every ability finds purpose here. Every person finds a home.

An evening like September 15th is simply this calling continuing forward — where your dinner, your bid, your sponsorship becomes part of a promise still being kept.

An Evening On Charitable Giving with Charles Schwab