New Youth Center Planned at Shepherd Hood Ministries

 

It is still a dream but now there are Angels in the architecture for this Youth Center in Mwingi Kenya. Pastor Simon Muvengei and Orchid are committed to get the funding necessary to build a facility like the one pictured and deliver a much needed brick and mortar sanctuary for the youth of this region of Africa.

Shepherd Hood Ministries has been delivering aid and services to young men and women by sending staff on motorcycles into the bush and communities that need aid. Their commitment to transforming the lives of each and every young person they can reach is unequaled.

Through programs that include; girls hygiene, controlled substance counseling, Christian outreach, sports camps, Bible school, Goat raising, School rallies, and Community interaction the ministry has reached and saved hundreds of kids by getting them back on track and back into school.

Now Shepherd Hood has their sight on erecting a facility that will serve a community of seven million people. This center that will serve as a hub for young people all around the area and deliver training and mentoring that can not be provided remotely. Internet, a technical training portal, sports center and housing are all planned.

This amazing facility will be a testament to the hard work of the Shepherd Hood team and Orchid sponsors like you. It will be another affirmation that God’s Grace truly exists in the world and that love and the caring for humanity is alive and well in Orchid’s garden.

Please join with us and pray for it’s success and contribute if you can.

God Bless

The Orchid Team

 

 

Lancaster County Microbrewery Fund Raiser

 

GET OUT TO LANCASTER AND GET HOPPY

Orchid is Raising Money to build a brand new Youth Center in Africa!!

On August 26th 2017 Orchid will be hosting a tour and tasting at five of the best micro breweries in the country all based in beautiful Lancaster County PA. They include Lancaster Brewing Company, Wacker Brewing, Spring House Brewing, Mad Chef Brewing,  Saint Boniface and JoeBoy’s. The tour also includes at the awesome Bulls Head Pub in Lititz PA; voted the best brew pub in Pennsylvania 2016 and 2017.

Ticket donations are tax deductible! Cost per person is $75.00
Buses will transport all attendees to and from each micro brewery.

Time: 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Master Brewers will be on hand to discuss each beer.

Special events to be announced for final stop!

Reserve your spot by making your donation on the website and indicating “beer’. You will receive a confirmation reservation.
Only 112 tickets available so sign up NOW.
Pickup Locations will follow 2 weeks before the event
Event is rain or shine. Beer tastes great wet.

To register just go the upper right corner of this post, click on Donate and make your $75.00 tax deductible donation. Reference the word “beer” on your donation and we’ll send you your confirmation/reservation. Only 112 tickets available!

Tour includes luxury bus accommodation to and from all drop off points and all breweries plus a tasting of your choice. Bring some loose change as you will want to taste much more and sample the awesome food at these amazing establishments!

This is a must event for your end of summer experience and you will be transforming lives around the world as you taste the best of Lancaster County. DON’T WAIT…RESERVE NOW!!!!

Can’t wait to see you at the pubs…..Rich

Want to Sleep Better?

 

As a kid when I had trouble sleeping my mother taught me to count sheep. Count sheep I thought….why would I do that? So I tried it and fell asleep.

When I got older my wife told me I should think of something soothing. A place or a memory that that could take my mind off my troubles. So I tried it and fell asleep.

Now I’ve taken to counting goats when I want to go to a place of Peace and Calm. I go there because they remind me of what can be accomplished with something so simple. They make me smile because I see children laughing and playing and working and going to school. I see rejoicing at being given a chance to live a dream….a dream of getting an eductaion.

I rejoice with families thousands of miles away from me, who now, because of a small determined four legged creature that won’t take no for an answer, can see a way to improve the life of their children. I laugh at the ridiculousness of it all and then work hard to be as ridiculous as possible and raise money to buy more of these silly little creatures.

I have decided that the goat is now my favorite animal and the more I count the better I sleep at night.

If you would like to sleep like a baby, laugh like a child and rejoice at helping your Christian brothers and sisters in Africa do the same and join me in 2017 and buy some ridiculousness. I know a great Shepherd who knows exactly what to do with your love.

Read the Full Report Here

Shepherd hood Ministries January Report

 

Small Grants Giant Outcomes

 

 

It doesn’t take a million dollar grant to deliver incredible change. It just takes you.

Orchid never set out to raise a lot of money and it was born of a simple creed: “Give away all the money raised and follow the gift into the hand of the needy”. That principal has never changed and the outcomes of that simple philosophy have surpassed even our wildest imagination. Every year we participate in programs brought to us by familiar and new philanthropic missions around the world as  well as here in the U.S. all of which are focused on making the lives of people in great need a little better. The focus can be on many challenges including education, healthcare, housing, Christian outreach, job creation, hunger alleviation, poverty remediation or in the case of Experiment Albania’s recent reaction to flooding in Albania, disaster relief.

The recent $500.00 grant that was sent to help a community in Albania was nothing in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars distributed by well established and critically important large charitable organizations around the world but I would argue it’s impact was just as significant. The reason  is that it was focused on a challenge no one else noticed and on families who’s lives are just as important as anyone’s on the planet including our own. Thanks to Orchid supporters like you those lives were made a little better and those familes are feeling a weight lifted off their shoulders. For them we might as well be “World Vision”.

What that money purchased was simple and re-cycled:

Second hand furniture (chairs, couches, PC, TV, mattresses, wardrobe) and Clothes (scarfs, gloves & hats) and some Christmas presents for the children of the affected community.

It proves that next to nothing can amount to next to everything and that not unlike the five loaves and two fish its a story of compassion for a people we don’t know but whom we should care deeply about and be determined to share a little of what we have with.

 

What would you do with 2.3 Million Dollars a Day?

 

Reprinted from Len Morris and Media Voices for Children

Imagine a sudden windfall. You wake up one morning and have the power to distribute $2.3 million dollars a day in charitable donations in your own hometown. Through your newfound philanthropy, you can help people access health care, feed the hungry, house the homeless, support community non-profits. The choices are limitless and they are yours to make.

BUT WHY EXACTLY $ 2.3 MILLION A DAY?

Because, according to Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsive Politics, that’s the amount the financial sector has spent every day from January 2015 to June 2016 on lobbying Congress and on campaign contributions. In all, the financial industry has spent a remarkable $667 million dollars on lobbying and influence peddling in Washington over the past fourteen months while contributing over $798 million dollars to politicians’ campaign coffers, an astounding 1.4 billion dollars spent to influence laws and regulations that will preserve their position at the top of the American economy, that breaks down to $2.3 million dollars a day spent to employ almost 1900 registered lobbyists to protect the status quo and give finance the upper hand in public policy.

I can assure you, America’s financiers aren’t spending money on lobbyists to help improve the lives of American citizens, but in a massive effort to weaken or repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform act of 2008. Without this law and the regulation it imposes, they can and will continue to take unreasonable risks with depositor’s money and if they fail, as they did during the financial crisis, they will once again turn to taxpayers pick up the tab. The last time that occurred, the bailout cost over 16 trillion dollars and the crisis wiped out millions of jobs, the retirements of tens of millions of people, generated record home foreclosures and small business failures, while taking the global economy to the brink of free-fall. Even today, a billion people continue to live in poverty having never recovered from a crisis manufactured by the unregulated greed of the financial sector. 400 million of those are children.

Now, almost ten years later, the financial sector continues to pay its executives outsized fees, salaries and bonuses and is using lobbyists to manipulate and game the system to escape paying their fair share of taxes.

Do you remember an ancient TV show from the 1950’s called The Millionaire? It was among the top ten most popular TV shows for 5 years and over 200 episodes, precisely because the Millionaire, an anonymous donor, was generous and changed the lives of every-day people.

The idea was simple. The Millionaire, whose face we never saw, anonymously gave a million dollars to working people, like the local milkman or a striving teacher.  His secretary would present the check on his behalf and we would watch to see how the money transformed the future of the lucky recipients.

As you might expect, not every recipient made good use of the money, a reminder that money is a powerful driver of human nature and can bring out the worst in people. However at the heart of The Millionaire was an appealing premise: wealth has a responsibility to the community which nurtures it and generosity is its own reward. It made for good TV.

But today’s lobbying by the financial sector is starkly real. Just for a moment, imagine you’re the millionaire looking to help others less fortunate and to improve your own hometown.

If it were up to me, I’d scale up housing vouchers and mental health services for veterans. I’d eliminate homelessness by expanding the availability of Section 8 housing vouchers. I’d renovate abandoned property and convert it into supervised halfway houses for mental health and addiction recovery programs. I’d provide food for the 400 families in my community that needed help to feed their children last winter.

I’d move to expand and improve school lunch programs and continue the meals during school vacations, as children eat daily, not just when school is in session.

I’d offer low-cost daycare for working families and student-parents and I’d expand Pre-K education and Head Start programs. I’d assign more social workers as case- workers to help move families from welfare to good jobs and have them work closely with the families to keep track of their progress and help cut red tape. This is actually an idea taken from Paul Ryan’s poverty program.

I’d expand programs in the arts from kindergarten through high school, support Special Olympics and special needs programs. Where I live, there’s a marvelous program that helps disabled children take riding lessons with amazing, transformative results!

It’s cold where I live and the cost of heating oil is the highest in the country, so I would offer heating assistance to those that qualify by income. I’d make health care more accessible with more clinics, no co-pays, particularly affordable dental and eye care and I’d screen all school-age children for hearing and vision issues. I’d expand meals on wheels and offer home health aides and nursing services at reasonable and subsidized prices to those with medical conditions that confine them at home.

I’d want the programs I fund to be run by local people and organizations that live in and understand my community and I’d expect them to work closely with our state and federal governments.

Unfortunately, the financial sector isn’t going to voluntarily fund social work at this level. They’d rather spend the money on a lobbyist or to curry favor with a politician, so rather than wait for them to do the right thing, I support the idea of a tiny tax on financial transactions, which would reduce empty speculation and trading that doesn’t benefit anyone in the real economy.

A tiny tax on all forms of financial transactions would be paid primarily by the 10% who own or control 80% of the American economy. It would tax all forms of financial transactions at miniscule rates, but, given the size of the American economy, the amount of money that would be generated would be tens of billions of dollars that could then be invested in ourselves: our children, parents, students, neighbors – our communities.

We don’t have to imagine $2.3 million a day, we could actually make it happen.

A financial transaction tax is a simple, tested and progressive mechanism for raising revenues to meet the chronically under-funded needs across our country.

Let’s give the U.S. financial sector the chance it richly deserves to do its fair share.