David George remembers the day he stood in the warehouse at Baptist Friendship House in New Orleans and saw something that surprised him.
“It’s a huge warehouse, and the walls were stacked with supplies that came in for Christmas in August,” he said.
Backpacks full of food and school supplies are ready to be given out to those in need. Your gifts to the Vision Fund help make these community missions efforts possible.
Baptist Friendship House—a ministry that reaches out to homeless women and human trafficking victims—had been featured that year in Missions Mosaic and other age-level materials, and to say readers had responded was an understatement.
It didn’t stop there.
In September 2020, the ministry saw another outpouring of love when Kay Bennett, the ministry’s director, was featured in WMU’s missions literature again. She received letters from both children and adults that she said encouraged her in just the right way at just the right time.
“Another blessing, since we were in pandemic time and everyone has learned how to use Zoom and other media, I was able to set up lots of Zoom meetings with WMU groups to share about our ministry and to answer questions,” Kay explained. “It was a blessing to be able to communicate with others, build relationships, and to give ideas on how to partner with us to help us meet the needs of others.”
Baptist Friendship House volunteers and staff pass out coffee and meals to the homeless in their community. Baptist Friendship House is one of thousands of ministries and missionaries that WMU groups all over the nation partner with in various ways because they read about them in Missions Mosaic and other missions education material.
She was also able to help some figure out how to get started fighting human trafficking and helping the homeless right where they are.
David, who serves as president for the WMU Foundation, says that’s exactly what the Vision Fund is meant for—to make things like that happen.
“It’s not a general catch-all fund, and it doesn’t go toward WMU’s operational costs,” he said. “All of the gifts to the Vision Fund go directly to support WMU ministries.”
That means ministries like Project Help and WorldCrafts, but it also means keeping publications like Missions Mosaic and age-level missions education materials going. And those things, David says, take gifts and multiply them exponentially.
One gift supporting multiple ministries
For example, ministries like Baptist Friendship House could receive a gift from you through another fund that went directly to help fight human trafficking. But by giving to the Vision Fund, you help produce the magazine that groups all over the country engaged with and contacted Baptist Friendship House to learn more about how they could support the ministry.
“It’s leveraging at its finest,” David said. “You may not buy the backpacks that go to a ministry, but you’re giving a gift that’s going to make 500 other organizations want to send backpacks. And we can’t calculate that impact.”
Sandy Wisdom-Martin, WMU executive director, said she found more than 11,000 “touchpoints” in WMU’s publications in the year 2020—more than 11,000 missionaries or ministries who were named in those pages.
Think about the impact that mention made on Baptist Friendship House, and imagine what your gift to keep WMU’s ministries going might do.
“Drill down to just one of those 11,000 and ask them what happened, what changed because a WMU group in Tennessee read a story and locked in and got involved with them,” David said.
Visit wmufoundation.com/vision to learn more about the Vision Fund and to give a one-time or monthly gift today.
Written by Grace Thornton.