Basic Accounting

Juda is now doing accounting. It's basic at this point, just keeping track of what the monthly expenses are and what's left over, but it's a very important step.

If the home is to be self sustaining, they must be able to keep track of finances and plan and budget. We're excited to see Juda doing so well. He hasn't ever done this before and he's doing a great job.

We all fall down

It takes broken people to heal the world. You, me, that guy down the street, none of us have all our stuff together. None of us have everything figured out. Even the ones who are good at making it look as though they do.

If we wait until we are perfect to try and do something good then the world will be waiting a very long time for a change that will never come. 

The world needs you, in all your imperfect glory. It needs you to try, and fail, and get up and try again to do what is right, to take care of a brother or sister in need, to right the wrongs and seek justice for those who can't find it on their own.

This world is so broken, so evil in it's make up, that it revels in the failures of someone who is doing good. How messed up is that? When Jason Russell's body and mind collapsed from strain there were folks lined up to aim a kick at him while he was down.

No wonder there are so many people afraid to try, afraid to do the good thing they know is in front of them to do.

But perfect or not, every action initiated in love counts. Your actions count. You are needed, and you can't give up just because the cruel and evil world will kick you when you fall down. That doesn't stop us from getting back up again. Just getting up is a victory. Just stepping out is a triumph. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

We will fall, because we are fallible, that's a given. But it's when we rise again and don't give up that we become heroes, and we can make a difference.

You are not alone. We're all in this together. We are behind you and, arms joined around the globe, we will keep fighting to make the world a better place.

Take a moment to praise and encourage the people and organizations you know who are #doinggood. They need to hear it.

#kony2action We're all in this together

Because of the film Kony2012 everyone in America, and that means most people
in the world as well, have become enthusiastically aware of a serious aspect of evil in
the world.

Invisible Children is amazing. They have just performed the single most impressive
awareness campaign ever. EVER. What is more, it isnʼt finished. They have set the bar
and set it high.

As with any time someone blows away the paradigm there has been some criticism. Mostly that they are not doing something about the problem. Against this there have been even better defenses. The criticisms fail for a couple of reasons. First, because they are in fact on the ground with excellent development projects. But more because the primary mission of Invisible Children is information and they have proven that they are more effective at this than anyone else, EVER.

What too many people forget is that we are all in this together. Everyone who is about making the world a better place is on the same team. To put it in business terms, all of us in the aid and development “industry” are units within the “Global Transformation Company”. We are all united in the same goal and to the same purpose. Our struggle for “market share” is not against each-other. Our collective struggle for market share is against the evil in the world. Invisible Children is currently the single most effective unit in the marketing division.

Kony 2012 has created a tidal wave of awareness that has the potential to grow far beyond its specific message.

The truth of the matter is that today, as people stand around and criticize one organization's awareness campaign, evil things happen:

children are being murdered
children are being forced to murder
children are being raped
children are working long hours in brutal slavery
children are dying because they don't have enough food to eat.
children are dying of waterborne diseases because they don't have access to clean water
children are begging in the streets
children are alone

and people, all over the world, are working to change that.

Now you are aware. Now you act.

#kony2action is for catalyzing the energy of awareness into action. The purpose of #kony2action is to directly translate the effectiveness of this unit of the “marketing division” into increased market share for the “Global Transformation Company” as a whole.

Use #kony2action to recommend other units within the “Company”. Not to take away from #Kony2012 but to increase even further the huge good it has already done.

As a show of solidarity organizations should not recommend themselves but shine the spotlight on others that they know to be doing good work on the ground.

Instead of getting sick and tired of the criticisms, letʼs prove them wrong! tweet #kony2action and tell the world about the good that is being done and how we each can take action or support someone who is!

Can you survive on just $2 for 1 day?

Spend some time around us at "The Charis Project headquarters", a grand name for what is really a few rooms at the back of our house containing a white board, a few computers, and a pile of other stuff with varying degrees of actual usefulness, and you will eventually hear a conversation about poverty statistics. What does it really mean that many in the world live on less than a dollar a day?

We didn't get to where we are with out thinking things through you see. So we ponder. Does that statistic adjust for buying power? Does it include the food they grow themselves. If a subsistence farmer lives on less than a dollar a day but grows everything he needs to eat then is the comparison useful or not?

I'm not going to answer those questions, by the way, they can be saved for later. What I want to know is do you think you could live on less than $2/day?

When Levi Benkert of Bringlove.in and the $2 day challenge first first told me about it I did a bit of mental math. The first thing I thought was, "We pay $50/day just for our house. How would we do it without sleeping outside somewhere?" (Which, by the way, would be an awesome challenge, but not as easily  accessible for  a lot of people.)

But then he told me that the challenge was much more simple. Could you eat, for a whole day, on just $2?

Could you eat, for one day, on double what many people around the world live on every day?

What would that look like?

Sometimes it takes something a little extreme to really wake us up, and give us the empathy we need to make a difference somewhere.

Maybe it takes being hungry for a day. 

How much could you accomplish if you were hungry all. the. time? How would your kids do in school when their bellies growled louder than the teachers words? What if more than 75% of what you make in a month just went to feeding your family?

Would you ever find a way out?

We're all about empowering communities and creating innovative solutions to entrenched difficulties here at The Charis Project. We can, because as busy as we are, we still have the education, and necessary nutrition, and leisure time to be able to think things up.

On December 8th we're going to take the challenge and eat for only $2, all day, because the first step to solving a problem is understanding a problem, and the first step to loving our neighbor is to be willing to know what it's like to be our neighbor in the first place.

And maybe, when we're feeling a bit peckish and dreaming of cheeseburgers we'll come a little closer to becoming the change we want to see in the world. At the very least, we'l be less complacent than we were the day before.

Join us! Take the challenge too.

The Charis Solution Benefit Concert

Live from San Marcos California it's the Charis Solution Benefit Concert

Featuring: Birds of Prey

with Kallee Blue and Alexa Reyes

and comedians
Beau McFarland
Peter Marr
Carlton Parks

Urgent call for Help

Do you remember when I told you about this big grant the we could be eligible for if only we could get enough votes to get to the second round?

We were doing really great for a while, holding steady at around 36 of the top 50. We're down to 58th place and we have to get into the top 50 by November 8th in order to be reviewed for one of the grants they are awarding. One is $50,000!

The difference between 58th place and 50th is only 115 votes.

I bet everyone will be scrambling this week to get as many votes as they can so please take a second, it's literally a second and go and vote for us. Book mark it and then whenever you are in a different place with your smart phone or laptop go and vote again, it will let you. I just tried it at the orthodontist's office.

Then if you could share a couple of times on facebook, twitter, and get us as many votes as we can get before next Tuesday. You guys already know how much this would help us out, but here's a reminder. We're developing a model for self sustaining orphan care that not only gives the children a safe place to live and grow up but address the economic and social problems in the community that caused them to need to be placed at an orphanage in the first place. The more funding we have the sooner we can develop all the different phases of our model to get the whole thing up and running and replicable everywhere there is need.

the story of moonscapes

A couple of years ago, when we were first starting The Charis Project  Melissa, the daughter of one of our board members, came to us and said, "I'd really like to help you guys out. I don't have a lot of money but here are a few things I could do."

She was in her last semester of design school and she took us on a her final project for her class on creating a branding package. She designed our logo for us and then expanded it into everything else, letter head, business cards, newsletter layout, and even web graphics. She's the reason we look so good.

She says that having the work she did for us in her portfolio helped her to land her first job out of school. They liked that she had already done something real.

To this day, whenever we have something we want to try I can shoot her an email and she get's back to me right away with something awesome.

At that time she said she was thinking of opening an etsy shop to sell stuff that she made and then donating half the proceeds. But for some reason for a long, long time we didn't realize she had actually done it. I'm not sure where I thought she was getting the money she kept donating every month, but I didn't realize that she had in fact started a very cool shop called moonscape handmade and was donating 50% of the proceeds to The Charis Project for the past few years until a couple of months ago. Yeah, I'm quick like that.

Anyway, you should check out moonfruit because her stuff is beautiful and you can get pretty, pretty things and help out orphans at the same time. Total win, win.

We're really fortunate to have someone like her on board.