transforming the lives of global youth
Overwhelmed with Excitement!
These are the final few days before the first classes at Opportunities NOW. It’s been a busy week doing a teacher orientation, tweaking the curriculum, and having lots of final meetings. It’s amazing how everything has come together. The last two years of ideas, meetings, and research are all coming together on Monday when students enter our facility to start their journey toward starting their own business. …
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Here at YouthHOPE, one way in which we transform the lives of global youth is through internships. Every summer we send teams out to work with our Global Youth Workers and be a blessing to the ministries. This is a way for us to give encouragement to our youth workers and for their ministry to get a boost of energy.
In about 5 weeks YouthHOPE will be sending out 15 college students and team leaders “to go into all the world” and work alongside our missionaries in 5 different countries.
On May 28th, all of our interns will come together for training and preparation in Fort Myers, Florida and then on June 3rd, they will go out…to Bulgaria, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, and Southeast Asia to learn, serve and grow.
This summer our interns will get a chance to learn and gain hands-on cross-cultural youth ministry experience while working with experienced Global Youth Workers and their ministries. Interns will
develop and teach in an …
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We have an exciting announcement to make at YouthHOPE for the youth of Myanmar!
God has opened doors for three international business as mission trainers from Chiang Mai, Thailand to train our summer internship participants and the Myanmar business community on business as mission skills. Originally our summer interns were going to travel to a conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand before coming to Myanmar. However, due to lack of interest from college students there, the company was forced to cancel the training. Our interns still needed training before this summer so he asked the trainers if they’d come to Myanmar instead. Their calendars were free and they accepted!
It gets better! In wanting to make their time in Myanmar worthwhile, Ryan talked with a couple of organizations in his network and the response was overwhelming. He approached the Myanmar Chamber of Commerce about doing a two hour session with some of their …
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This morning as I was spending time with God, He revealed to me His presence in the lives of global youth since the foundations of the earth. He used Jeremiah to edify his chosen people. He used David to kill Goliath with nothing but a stone, a slingshot, and faith that God was faithful and able to keep His promises. God has always been moving, and at YouthHOPE I have the great privilege of sharing the stories of what He is doing now.
Building Houses
A year ago one of our global youth workers in Southeast Asia came upon a family that laid heavy on her heart. Here are some thoughts after her first encounter back in May 2011….
“What we observed that day was disturbing to say the least. Upon arrival we learned that the mother was in the hospital after having her 12th baby the previous night. What they called home didn’t even have four walls, the youth hardly had clothes, no shoes and we learned that they all ate …
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U.S. Moves to Normalize Relations with Myanmar
What this means for holistic youth development? …
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Much of my life I heard of people going on mission "trips"....
They would often come back with a new understanding of God and His character. In my heart I desired stories like that, to be a part of something bigger than myself. My freshman year of college I had the chance to take a mission trip to help build houses. I had a mindset that "I am going to bring these people something that they need and it is my responsibility to do it." Our team came in, worked hard, built relationships, built houses, and then left. I remember saying goodbye at the end of 7 days with a deep sense of heartache thinking, what's next? Looking back I see how this mission trip was more about me than it was about those I went to serve. Honestly, it was like I had my own agenda, wanting to fill this need deep inside of me to help others.
I had an opportunity to travel to Cambodia last summer with YouthHOPE, and unintentionally, I took …
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Dozens of articles and reports by the UN, CNN, BBC, Unicef and others in the past few years have focused on the global youth unemployment crisis. As the global economy continues to waiver and bend, millions around the world fight the effects of unemployment.
According to a report by the International Labor Office, there were approximately 81 million unemployed youth between the ages of 15-24 at the end of 2009--the highest ever.
Many governments and organizations are establishing programs and schemes to fight this trend, to give hope to a generation trying to find their place. In the UK, the prime minister is planning an incentive that would give employers subsidies to employ 18-24 year olds for six-month periods. Throughout the world, programs are starting up to train youth for small business ventures and entrepreneurship opportunities.
The world seems to be taking notice of this global youth crisis, slowly, but …
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During the last year, we have been talking with several different ministries in India about partnership opportunities.
There are some wonderful ministries that God is working through in India and this year we will be visiting some of them to learn and look for direction about moving forward. We are very excited since the need in India is so great. Only about 2% of the country is Christian, where more than half of the 1.2 billion people living there are under the age of 25 years old. There are few places where the global youth ministry opportunity is greater.
As I was reading the news the other day, the following headline slapped me right in the face “In India, the challenge of building 50,000 colleges”. I read the article and learned that India is trying to solve the problem of the need to educate more than 100 million young people over the next ten years. At the moment a mere 17% of their graduates are immediately …
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A few months ago we had a brainstorming meeting trying to tackle our developing problem of having too much going on around the globe. It is a great problem, but we realize we have more requests from teams around the world for long-term workers to come alongside them than we could realistically fill over the next year or two. One idea that came out of the meeting was to catalog the opportunities and create a database online of job openings in global youth ministry. We ended up with not only a database, but also an interactive map.
Within days of it being up and running on our website we had someone fill out an application to serve full-time in Zambia. We obviously did not expect results this quickly. The speed of the application coming in was not the most exciting bit though, but rather the location. The applicant was a Kenyan feeling called by God to do youth ministry in Zambia. We had not anticipated non-North Americans applying. …
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One of the projects that YouthHOPE is developing is about creating jobs for youth. Unemployment for youth is at an all-time high and it is impacting their lives and communities in a very negative way. Many youth are looked to in order to help provide for their families and for the millions of AIDS orphans, even to be the head of the household. We feel like one very tangible way that we can share the love of Christ with them is through the creation of jobs. You can read more about this type of ministry in our Southeast Asia project.
There is a flip-side to this. And it is even uglier. One of the things that we like to talk about is the potential that youth have. We are not the only ones that believe that. However, there are too many that want to take advantage of that potential rather than empower. Child labor was dealt with in the United States in 1924 when the Child Labor Amendment was passed to limit, …
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