Global Community Partners: February 2014

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Moving Forward in 2014

Global Community Partners has been quiet for a long time because I have been quiet for a long time. There has been a lot of thought and prayer regarding GCP and its future. BUT, it is time to move forward now. It has been decided, not quite by me, that we should move forward. So we are coming back. There is of course a lot of paperwork entailed in order to officially come back, so we will have to spend the next few months figuring out how to go about doing that.

I am also volunteering with a classmate to organize a medical mission trip to Nigeria this June, and if we are able to sort out all the paperwork for GCP, this will be our first partnership project, and certainly not the last one for this year. I am fund-raising for these projects so if you would like to make a donation, please contact me. I will post information about my fund-raising on a different blog post.

So pray for us and keep your fingers crossed for us! We'd love to come back full-force with renewed zeal and compassion for those children around the world who are suffering and the communities that could use some partners in improving the lives of their children.

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.