Visionaries. Movement-builders. Innovators. Changemakers. Tomorrow’s leaders. Trailblazers. Our future. These are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to who young people are. Young people have boundless potential to grow and become, and they do so as their minds and bodies develop rapidly bringing them into maturity.
If these things are true, then why do so many young people struggle? How does another young girl become pregnant at 14 erasing all hope of her high school diploma and her dream of becoming a doctor? How does a young person with their limitless potential end up orphaned, hungry, and living in a “temporary” shanty for more than a decade? What happened to the tall, talented young boy in Chemistry who took his own life?
Young people are often forgotten people.
Young people are consistently and detrimentally the most unreached people group in the world. Humans cannot survive without water and food. Nor can they survive being unseen, undervalued, and underdeveloped. While youth are capable of great things- without hope, young people are lost. The trajectory of a young person’s life will be determined by whether or not someone sees them, loves them, and champions them.
In our neighborhoods and cities, from the wealthiest to the poorest, from the most established to the extremely temporary, young people are growing up without the care they need to be healthy, to understand the worth of their life, and to discover and realize their exact purpose.
We reach young people.
We have done so for more than twenty years through an approach we call, “Love Your City.” We have walked into crime-ridden slums, disengaged private schools, crumbling apartment complexes, and bustling universities to find them, to develop them, and to launch them into the growth-filled adventure of becoming changemakers on a mission to transform their own neighborhoods.
And it works.
Young people are different, for the better. They walk out of toxic behaviors, dangerous relationships, and complicated misbeliefs, exchanging the lies and the hopelessness for vision, purpose, and faith. There are influential leaders today who were isolated youth just a few years ago. There was a slum in Latin America that is not there anymore; it is gone because the people grew. The stories keep going and are in the thousands; the impact fills our hearts with wonder.
For as difficult and damaging as the realities facing young people are, they are not hard to get to and reach. They are right there.
Ready.
Waiting.
Love Your City works and is growing. As the work deepens in more and more cities, reaching more young people, they will need champions like you to support them as they go.
This year alone, we grew into a new region of Nigeria, totaling four teams within that country alone. In Gwinnett County, GA, we built the Pipeline program, which connects companies and young people, developing both to be great employers and employees. In Ethiopia, we established a partnership with CRU that will lead to Love Your City being implemented by 730 churches across the capital next year. We launched our first Middle Eastern team into Beirut, Lebanon, an important breakthrough in a region that needs a different future for their youth.
And still, there are more young people. Today’s youth cannot be the world’s greatest unreached people group. The world's greatest problems will be solved by launching youth as changemakers who ignite city-wide movements that transform hurting neighborhoods.
By the year 2030, we will have 30 teams throughout Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, and, by God’s grace, we will impact and launch over 150,000 young people into significant world change. And we need you to be part of it.
In the next two years, we need to raise 3 million dollars so that we can find and train new leaders, establish new teams, and support our current teams as they expand across their countries.
Today, we are asking for you to join us as we raise $250,000 by December 31, the first step to 3 million dollars and reaching new teams, new countries, and new young people.
Your generosity is essential to reaching the world’s greatest unreached people group, to solving the world’s biggest issues, and to fulfilling the great commission.
