The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call. - Acts 2:39
YOU FULLY ENGAGED
God has blessed our church and community with your skills and abilities. As we build relationships, here are a number of teams you can be a part of:
After School Academy Team:
• Academic tutors • Snack coordinators • Recreation leaders
Support Team:
• Training facilitators • Logistics organizers • Schedulers
• Metrics trackers and reporters • Financial recorders
• Application/Certification supervisors
Communication Team:
• Determine target audiences and frequency of contact
• Match distribution methods with target audiences
• Establish a social media presence
Future Planning Team:
• Program planners • Resource planners • Partnership liaisons
COMMUNITY IMPACT
The Lilly Endowment has provided us training to learn a method to maximize community impact. As we have been coached in their methodology, the following key aspects surfaced:
Relational: the goal is creating relationships, more than delivering service
Asset-Based: the ministry will rise from being strength focused
Collaborative: we will partner with others (churches, organizations, individuals) to achieve relationship goals
Based on our conversations with the FC congregation and the local community, we chose the following focus areas to build relationships where children and families can flourish:
Community: our community will be kids and families at Sharon Elementary school and Newburgh Elementary school
Ministry: our initial focus will be to come alongside and build relationships through these activities:
Tutoring
Developing social skills
Connecting families to resources
Community Impact will go beyond our current Sharon Elementary engagements. We prayerfully plan to add continuous ministries seeking to build relationships, trust, and skills starting with After School Academy. It will be done in partnership with other organizations. We will continue our current events-based service delivery such as back-to- school (school supplies, haircuts), our Christmas outreach (household supplies), and paper drive (copy paper for the teachers).
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR
Central to any growing community is learning to be a good neighbor. Learning to walk alongside others - hand in hand, heart to heart. Learning and growing together by building genuine dependable relationships. Community Impact is much more than giving to your neighbor, it is being with your neighbor.
We have spent months asking questions of our neighbors to learn their needs, hurts, and hopes. And in the process, we discovered we share many things in common. As we were engaging in conversations with our community, we also spent time talking with our church family. We thoroughly enjoyed hearing of your passions, skills, and visions.
In the end, it was evident that our focus for Community Impact should be with kids and families. Ministering to each other is always built on trust. Trust takes time, patience, and endurance to establish; even so, we are excited to begin.
The nature of the two communities are shown below:
CONNECT
We plan on reaching out to the community in new ways! When you think of past outreach events at FC, you may think of school supplies and tubs, but through much prayer and many conversations we know God is leading us away from one-off events to building relationships.
This fall, we plan to launch after-school tutoring at Sharon and Newburgh elementary schools! It will be a fresh way to establish relationships with families ... all while opening avenues to sharing His good news. Also, we learned from our Christmas event last year at Sharon Elementary that families are more likely to attend when the event is held at a familiar location such as the school. We are eager to announce that the school administrators have agreed to let us hold the Back-to-School events at the schools this year.
If you feel led to partner with us, please click here to fill out the form and someone from Community Impact will contact you to discuss how you can partner in making an impact on our community.
For more information or any questions you may have, contact any of our team members below:
Penny Kaluza Debbie Pate Jara Dillingham Larry Groves Tonya Kramer Carol Holder