Lauren Poe Formally Leaves Ignite Life Center

On Wednesday, the Sister Cities of Gainesville nonprofit, which is doing business as the Greater Gainesville International Center (GGIC), formally left Ignite Life Center (ILC) Church. Public records show GGIC placed their principal and mailing addresses at the United Church of Gainesville.

The move constitutes an official change to GGIC's location, however, GGIC may have moved to the United Church of Gainesville earlier, as they changed the address on their website a few months back. The exact date their website address changed from ILC to the United Church of Gainesville is unclear, but internet archive shows it was sometime between September 9, 2025, and October 13, 2025.

GGIC is headed by Lauren Poe, the former mayor of Gainesville.

ILC is headed by Mark Vega, who was arrested in November 2025 on a warrant for failing to report suspected child abuse.

Back in the summer of 2024, Vega announced his partnership with a “former mayor” and his “greater Gainesville” program, indicating they would house refugee families.

By that time, since July 2023, three people from ILC had already been arrested for child sexual abuse, including Vega’s son, Christian Vargas, who was released on bond within a day and still actively attends ILC while on pretrial release. An overwhelming number of sexual offenses relating to ILC occurred on church grounds. There were numerous news articles about the arrests coming out of ILC from a variety of publications on the internet at the time Poe moved GGIC there.

Poe officially moved GGIC to ILC in October 2024. (It currently says they moved in February 2025 on Sunbiz because that is when they refiled their nonprofit registration).

The program later shut down because President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning refugee resettlement, however, at the time GGIC continued using ILC as an office space.

Although Poe previously declined to comment, in a May 2025 interview with GnvInfo, Terrence Ho, an executive member of GGIC, admitted that refugees were temporarily housed at ILC. Ho said they since found permanent housing. 

In a speech from last summer where Poe referenced the refugee resettlement program but didn’t mention ILC’s involvement, he stated, “You either came here because in your family, there was an immigrant, a refugee, or a slave… While every immigrant and refugee story is unique, they're also, in many ways, the same. They are all making the most difficult decision they will ever have made in their lives to leave their home, to leave everything they know and everybody they love, because their situation was so unbearable… The violence that they face every day is so oppressive that they needed to start somewhere else… We are now told a story of the criminal that is the immigrant. We're made to believe that every person here is somehow here to do us harm, but in reality, they are the most likely victims of crime. They're the most likely to be abused.”