Another week of harvest work in Zambia, and another week of fundraising in America.
Lets start on this side of the ocean: we added another $10,000 to our harvest funds this week, and now feel like we have enough to accomplish the plan for this year. I will likely send over another $95,000 with the June wire and ask the guys to distribute that to the regions we didn’t get to this month. So excited for this project, once again this year. Thanks so much to the families and church that participated in this effort. We continue to seek monthly donors, underwriters of clean water projects, underwriters of feasts for the August trip, and those interested in the training and input provision that will be ongoing between now and the end of 2025.
Let’s stay in America for just one more paragraph. Can you even imagine a prolonged period in your life when you didn’t know where your next meal would come from? A season where you averaged less than two meals daily? I wonder how you would react when a delivery arrived that promised some relief from your prolonged hunger…
That is what we are seeing in today’s video from Zambia. This is a community in the Mambwe region in eastern Zambia where they have been struggling to put food on the table. We enlisted the aid of local pastor Chickwanda Mbewe and he coordinated trasport and delivery of enough maize that these vulnerable community members have some HOPE that the season ahead will be BETTER.
That is what Shoulder 2 Shoulder is trying to accomplish with this work. We now believe we will be able to go from our current level of 72 communities across the country to more than 120! Around 50 communities like the one in this video – who haven’t participated to this point – will have maize stored to feed many of their most vulnerable members monthly for the next twelve months.
Videos like this one really make me happy to be a part of this! Even as we are moving ahead with our monthly program, and the training and inputs funding later this year, we already have an eye on this very same harvest funding in 2026. Can we do more next year? We certainly CAN. Nothing is ever certain, but there are a few ways we can do more next year:
- Those American families that participated this year can do a little more next year; I, for one, am very hopeful that my financial situation will allow me to do more next year.
- We can have participation from more American families next year. That will likely only be accomplished by word of mouth, since we do very little actual marketing. If you participated or at least appreciate what we are doing, please consider if there is someone in your circle of friends or relatives that might want to hear about this work and participate with us.
- We can have more GROUPS participate next year. This year only one church contributed to the harvest effort. If we had more churches or small groups that wanted to make this part of their efforts to care for the poor, as Jesus and the other scriptural authors seem to indicate is one of God’s most important purposes for those of us with means, then who knows how many we could feed!
