Global Community Partners: April 2008

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Vote for our proposal!

Click here to vote for our proposal for our Malawi trip this summer. This proposal is simply to raise funds to contribute to the high school while I am there. I set a fund-raising goal of about $2000 just through this site alone. But before the actual fund-raising starts, the proposal needs to receive 100 votes before it can be counted as an actual fund-raising "project".

So please vote and spread the word! Thanks!!

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Upcoming activities/events

April Board Meeting
Provide "change" for Malawi, one community at a time
Yard sale
Presentation of summer plans
Eun-sil travels to Malawi in late July for almost 3 weeks

April Board Meeting: Our regularly scheduled Board meeting (meets 3 times a year) will be happening this month. The date has yet to be determined but will be the last weekend of April. Location: TBD - but in the greater Los Angeles area as usual.

Provide "change" for Malawi, one community at a time: Ever wonder what to do with all those pennies and nickels? It weighs down your pockets, fills up your change purse, and using them just takes too much time sometimes. Well, collect them in a jar or a bag for us! This is one of our fund-raising campaigns. All the change collected will be taken to a coin-counting machine (if you live in the L.A. area, we will be collecting them; if not, there is a coin-counting machine in most of your grocery stores) and the money raised will go towards the creation of a soccer field at Kings Victory Academy in Blantyre, Malawi. Any money that's collected over the amount needed for the soccer field will go towards the Orphan Fund at this high school (Kings Victory Academy).

Yard Sale: Do you have things you want to get rid of but not throw away? Things that have a lot of good use left in them, but just don't have any use for you? We will be doing a yard sale in June and the proceeds will go towards Eun-sil's trip to Malawi. Obviously this is more feasible for those who are in Los Angeles as the yard sale will be held in L.A. when Eun-sil goes back for about a week. However, if you are so inspired to do so, hold a yard sale in your area on your own - or gather some friends and do it together! Then forward the funds to: Global Community Partners, 10329 Fernglen Avenue, Tujunga, CA 91042.

Presentation of summer plans coincides with Eun-sil travels to Malawi late July for almost 3 weeks: I (I being Eun-sil) will be at Yebon Church in Los Angeles, CA this June to make a presentation of how I'll be spending my three weeks in Malawi. If you would like to attend, I will post the date, time, and location in June so you can drop by. As an overview, I am doing a few things in Malawi, one of which is related to Kings Victory Academy that I mentioned previously. I will be conducting a workshop with the high school teachers at Kings Victory Academy and learning more about that community in general. I also hope to be traveling around the country of Malawi to see what it is like there (I haven't been back in 21 years) now and to see if I can get to know the needs of the community and the people there before we launch into anything else.

So, as you see, we have much going on. If you would like to just send us a donation, we also accept those. All donations are tax-deductible; forms are in the process of being filled out and filed with the IRS. If you donated last year, your donations are tax-deductible regardless of the status of our forms as our total annual revenue did not exceed $5000 (in fact was a very small percentage of that). Our mailing address again is: Global Community Partners, 10329 Fernglen Avenue, Tujunga, California 91042, USA.

Thanks!!

Welcome to our news!

Hello and welcome to the news blog for Global Community Partners (or GCP as we like to call it)! While our website is down and we sort out the issues we're having, I thought that this would be most appropriate so that people can still feel like there is something they can click on, look at, and find out more info about us! Furthermore, since I'll be in Malawi this summer doing some initial work for GCP, this would be a handy way to keep you up-to-date as much as possible from abroad! At the bottom of the page is a box called "Snapshots". Here I will try to post pictures related to GCP work and people. And please feel free to leave comments and questions!! Thanks!!!

Our Vision

Global Community Partners’ vision is to build partnerships in developing community around children all over the world. Supporting this vision are our guiding values that are integral to our organization. All our guiding values are based upon a way of work and life as followers of Jesus. We are a Christian organization that believes in one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and believe further that Jesus lived, died, and rose again. We believe that Jesus is an integral part of our lives and in Him, we see the example of how we are to care for those around us. Our work is guided by the following principle beliefs:

Children’s Rights

- We believe that children are vitally important to the improvement of our future. As delineated in the UN Convention of Children’s Rights and other such documents, children have rights that must be valued and protected, particularly in those places where poverty and crises exist.

Child-focused Community

- We believe that his/her environment, immediate, and removed, influences every child. Therefore, focus on children must also include education of the immediate community and raising the awareness of the global community. We believe in providing tools for the immediate and global communities through education, support, and training.

Community Partnership

- We believe in partnerships, partnerships with existing communities to help build a stronger, empowered community that can in turn help empower their children. We believe in building relationships in these communities and we believe in long-term goals rather than short-term goals, or one-time trainings, meaning that we are willing to work on an on-going basis with communities to provide input, education, and training on a long-term and on-going basis. These community partnerships include governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and other entities.

Respect for Culture

- We respect the cultural diversity of the global community and therefore believe in working with each community on an individual basis to incorporate cultures and traditions in coming up with a viable way to improve community. We believe in being responsible and maintaining respect for the communities we work with, the culture, the traditions, and the environment.

Overall Principle

- We believe that people, particularly children and their families, are integral and central to our work and to that end, we commit to uphold these guiding principles in the presence of God and of each other. We believe that there is no substitute for the manner in which we think, work, and live and our commitment to these guiding values must be evident in our interaction with each other, the communities we work with, and the global community at large.
Targeted beneficiaries will ultimately be children, but beneficiaries will also include the community around these children – families, immediate and extended, as well as other adult community members. Activities that GCP will undertake include research, program development, and implementation of programs as well as monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of program.