Jefferson's Servant Partner Journey

Hello friends and family!

I have recently been accepted to a 2 year internship that I will be participating in after college with an organization called Servant Partners. The goal of Servant Partners is to help raise up communities within low-income urban areas. The organization does this by having members of the organization live within the communities they are seeking to outreach to so that they can see how the community can benefit the most through God’s love. 

    So what does it look like to raise up a community through God's love?  This means raising up a community by providing it with things that will allow it to flourish and grow in a constructive way. This can mean starting Bible Studies, starting local political initiatives to build up the community, supporting local churches in the area,  or starting literacy programs that will help locals with getting jobs. Servant Partners strives  to directly ask a community what its needs are, and then find local community leaders that will  help create ways for those needs to be met  in with continual, self-sustainable solutions.

My 2 year internship is going to have two parts to it. Firstly, I will be living in Guatemala for 3 and a half months to learn Guatemalan Spanish and also become accustomed to Guatemalan culture.  This first part of the internship is essential to being able to understand the people we will be serving in the second part of the internship in a more intimate way. During the second part of my internship, I will be using my experiences in Guatemala to  help build foundational relationships with the locals in a Guatemalan immigrant community in Oakland for the rest of my internship. By building these foundational relationships, me and my team will be able to find local leaders that will help us implement and plan local community intiatives that will help meet the needs of locals in the neighborhood. I am very excited to be serving this community on the behalf of Servant Partners and I know this will be rich and fulfilling experience. 

However, there is one caveat to this internship. Since Servant Partners is a non-profit Christian organization, one of the most difficult things that Servant Partners faces is its ability to raise funds to support the work its doing within communities. Because of this, Servant Partners is asking each of its interns that are working in the Oakland area to fundraise 7,500 dollars.  Fortunately, I  have already been able to raise 2500 dollars in fundraising through various means, but that still leaves 5000 more dollars to fundraise! Because of this, I am asking you, my family and friends, to help me with my fundraising efforts by donating to this GoFundMe campaign! Please help me in this endeavor! I leave for Guatemala in late August and would be ecstatic to see my internship needs fully fundraised by that point in time.

Please feel free to ask me any questions about it about the internship! :)

With much love and admiration for you all,

Jefferson