Tag: Mission

Sweet Miss Giving’s is a new bakery in Chicago that opened last week to great fanfare. Mayor Daley not only attended the grand opening, he helped cut the ribbon. After all, the city had contributed nearly $100,000 towards its opening–because it’s part social service agency. The bakery is the brainchild of the Rev. Stan Sloan, CEO of Chicago House, which provides community-based support to people who have been marginalized because of HIV and AIDS. With the bakery, the organization is able to provide valuable job training to people like Mary, a former street hustler, and Stanley, an ex-convict who had been homeless since his release from prison.

Nearly £2 trillion has been pledged to stabilise the banking system and start the flow of credit again. This is nearly 36 times the aid sent by the richest nations of the world to the poorest every year, and 190 times the gross domestic product of the whole of Ethiopia. We are, it seems, as profligate when it comes to solving our own problems as we are miserly when it comes to solving other people’s.

The USAID grant will be implemented in January of 2009 and will fund Episcopal Relief & Development’s programs in Northern Uganda where there are currently at least 1.4 million people living in Internally Displaced People camps. Janette O’Neill, Senior Director for Africa Programs, is currently in Uganda working with local partners to develop a holistic program.

Katharine Babson is a priest of the Episcopal Church who’s been doing missionary work in Myanmar on and off since 1994. There’s an article published today that describes her ministry and her love for the people among whom she works.

“Sometimes, we need to make accommodations so they can be part of the community,” he says. At a recent service, a woman walked to the front of the church and took the microphone. “She can’t talk well and she stumbles, but she thanked everyone for praying for her brother,” Beck says. Sometimes he must remind her not to put her fingers in the common Communion cup.

‘Episcopal Relief & Development is committed to maintaining the highest standards of accountability so we are extremely pleased to be recognized by Charity Navigator for excelling at this,’ says Robert W. Radtke, president of ERD.

If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity? This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.