Hopeland is proud to be a founding signatory to the Global Church Pledge to see children thriving in safe and loving families, joining more than 45 other organizations who have already signed. We hope that by being a member of this vital movement we can contribute to improving the lives of children worldwide who are growing up without a family.
The Global Church Pledge says that families are the best environment for children and young people to receive the love, belonging, and protection they need to flourish. The pledge calls upon the signatories to support efforts that strengthen families, invest in family-based solutions, and combat the root causes of their vulnerability.
Hopeland’s CEO, Nick Evans, addressed a meeting of leaders of global organizations committed to ensuring every child has a safe, loving home, September 2019
This collaborative spirit of working with faith-based organizations is why we worked with our friends at Faith To Action Initiative and Home For Good in 2019 to organize a meeting on the margins of the UN General Assembly Meeting in 2019. This meeting, which brought together the leading organizations in the global movement for family care, has led directly to the publication this week of the Global Church Pledge. We believe this will be a momentous point in the effort to ensure every child has a safe, loving family.
Faith to Action have been the leading force behind the Global Church Pledge. Their Executive Director, Elli Oswald, said this about Hopeland’s involvement: “It was great to work with Hopeland on the event in New York to create a global commitment on family based care – I am so excited that Hopeland have signed the Global Church Pledge and continue to work with us.
“Many key organizations have already signed the pledge, including the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Catholic Relief Services, and World Vision. We will continue to work together to encourage the faith community to pledge to take action to support the idea of family based care and ensure every child has a safe, loving home.”
The purpose of the pledge is to say that the Global Church has a role to play in our joint mission of creating a world where every child can thrive because of the love and support that a family gives to them and that by working together we can magnify our impact.
Hopeland has joined this effort because we believe in its importance and because we know the vital role that the Global Church will play in tackling this monumental issue. Growing up outside of a family has a significant negative impact on a child’s development and when it continues for too long this developmental harm can be permanent.
Without a family a child’s physical, mental, and neurological development is cut short – making it clear why it is so important that we work together to see every child raised in a family. For too long, and still to this day, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent from the United States to orphanages around the world, much of it from churches. It is work like the Global Church Pledge that hopes to show how to better use this money to benefit the children it is supposed to help.
The Global Church Pledge is a massive step forward in this goal because it allows the many organizations working on this task to unite around a single, simple mission. It also gives additional credibility to each individual organization to show they are not alone in their belief that children should be in families and not orphanages. Finally, it has also been shown that when an organization or an individual signs a pledge that action is far more likely to lead to behavior change. It is nine times more expensive to support a child in an orphanage than in a family so by working together and pledging to make a change we can truly have a huge impact on the lives of children separated from their families.
If you want to learn more about the Global Church Pledge or if you want to sign the pledge yourself you can do so here.
