Global Community Partners: May 2010

Sunday, May 16, 2010

GCP News Update

It has been high time since there has been an update, so here goes! We had our regularly scheduled Board Meeting in April, and we are progressing on a new project in Malawi. We have some time before seeing how things will work out, but the beginnings look good! Please continue praying for us as we formulate this new project! We are working with someone in Malawi to bring this project up to speed -- something we're temporarily going to call Growing Malawi. It's our aim to facilitate a sustainable project that can be run by Malawians, not us. I will share the specifics in a subsequent update once we've got things more solidified!

On the technology side, we now have GCP email addresses for our staff and our Advisory Board President, Dr. Daniel Newman. All of our email links can be found on our website. For general information, email can be sent to: info@globalcommunitypartners.org.

We also have a page on Facebook -- just do a search for "Global Community Partners" and you will find it; please make sure you "Like" it if you support our work! :) And of course, we are also on Twitter, so follow us if you're on Twitter!

Our next scheduled Board Meeting will be in August and we hope to have more news for you in the near future regarding Growing Malawi. In the meantime, my classes are over and I have a dissertation proposal to work on! Happy summer!!

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.