Global Community Partners: GCP Update: Look forward and look around!

Monday, February 2, 2009

GCP Update: Look forward and look around!

This is from our January email update. Sorry for the tardiness!
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Happy New Year everyone!

I can't believe it's already the middle of January of another year! I just realized that I should be sending out another update in keeping with my one update a month. :) I just returned to New York after a truly restful vacation in Southern California. I slept - for the most part - and didn't do a whole lot, seemingly wanting to catch up on all the sleep I've missed over the past semester. And now I'm back in New York, back to work, and back to what winter really is out here. As I write, today's forecast is 19F for the high, and 6F for the low. It snowed about 4 inches I must say, between last night and this afternoon. This is all a drastic change for me considering my last full day in Southern California was spent being really hot (high 70s) and me wearing no socks while lamenting the lack of summer clothes in my stash at home. Yup; I'm definitely back in cold weather.

Well, it's hard to believe that Christmas was less than a month ago. And Christmas time was filled with joy and reflection as well as giving and receiving. But now it's 2009, and what does this new year bring? The last sermon of 2008 that I heard was called "Don't Stop", and the mention of letting go of past failures and successes really struck me. We've all been there - looking back at the year and what we had done; some things we might not want to recall while other things we want to re-live over and over again, cherishing each moment. And in cherishing all the successes and happy moments, I forget to live in the present or find myself setting up a standard for this year by what occurred last year. Not good, I think, because it can limit the attitude in which I experience things in the coming year. So I want to let it all go. I am thankful for what God has brought me through in the past year; but I know so much more awaits me this year. I look forward to more adventures, more closeness with Him, more closeness with the people I love, and just more experiences that make me cherish what life I've been given. I don't want to stop - stop growing, stop experiencing, stop learning, stop seeing, stop talking, stop praying, stop reading, and stop living. I also don't want to stop looking around me. Life is not lived in isolation, and it is not really every man for himself, or every woman for herself. And I hope GCP is one of those methods of "looking around", not just for me but for all of you as well.

As I look forward to this year and what work GCP is looking to do, the first thing admittedly I think about is "IFs": IF I am able to, I would like to go back to Malawi this summer; IF there is something we can do in a couple of weeks, we should look into it; IF the funds are available, I can figure something out for this summer. And in these IFs, I forget that I am not doing this by my strength alone. At our last Board meeting in December, Pastor Newman said we should plan on God providing; and how quickly I have forgotten who really does provide ALL the time, in HIS good time.

So in this update I simply want to ask for your prayers as we look forward to another year of GCP. And I hope that this year brings much excitement and many many blessings for all of you and your families. I look forward to being able to share more things with you and partnering in more projects. I am truly thankful for all of you!

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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.