This week has been long. The needs from my international friends have been great. The work to push forward with Asha’s Refuge has been steady. There has been a lot I could write about.

I have a new friend. I met her while visiting the government housing community. She was working inside an apartment doing work in a community in the same manner that Asha’s Refuge is working at Woodcrest. Her name is Lashanta and she’s with Serving in Christ Ministries and The Neighborhood Center. She works to help feed and meet the needs of the poor. Her heart is huge and her vision is solid.

I asked Lashanta how she was able to offer help to the uneducated, poor and disadvantaged international families in her community. She expressed that helping the refugees was something she wanted to learn more about but at the time she really felt unable to really help them because of the language barrier. She felt inadequate. I assured and encouraged Lashanta to not be afraid and hopefully let her know that there were ways she could be involved with this group of poor individuals too. I explained to her that I, too, felt that poor Memphians had often just gotten off track and needed lots of love and encouragement to pull themselves together to get back on track. But, most all of my refugee friends were extremely stuck and at a disadvantage; they had never even been given a track to get on. In my opinion, my refugee friends are of the least of the least of these. The poorest of the poor. After our heartfelt talk, I was happy and knew that Lashanta wasn’t going to shut the door on the idea of offering help.

Recognizing that our hearts were lined up with similar passions, Lashanta and I quickly scheduled another meeting. We met this week. We shared our visions, our hearts, our experiences and we could tell we needed to stick together. We prayed together. We verbally partnered.

Finding community organizations and people who are like minded with Asha’s Refuge is very important. Being able to successfully partner with these organizations is even more important. There are many organizations already in existence that offer various types of assistance that would benefit disadvantaged refugees. The refugees just are not aware of them nor do they understand how to tap in to their resources. Asha’s Refuge can help by partnering with many organizations. We will assist both the refugee individual and the organization as they learn to work together.

I believe it will be imperative to the success of Asha’s Refuge to have partnerships. The needs are so great that it will take the cooperation of the whole community involving various companies, other nonprofits, many individuals and lots of churches to succeed. A lot of my work from day to day involves researching and meeting organizations that may already have in place a way to help a refugee in a particular area. I am thankful for how God keeps showing us people and resources that we can tap into so we are not always reinventing the wheel. Partnering also helps to keep the cost of running Asha’s Refuge down. My new friend, Lashanta, will prayerfully be one of many of our partners.

(If you know of an organization who may be of interest in helping our initiatives at Asha’s Refuge either by partnering or making a donation, please prayerfully let us know.)