Each February Asha’s Refuge does something we call The “Just Love” project. This project allows us to thank our volunteers and supporters for the previous years help, update them on how we did the previous year and share with them our thoughts and goals going forward. The project also allows us to collect a “Just Love” financial donation so that we can get a good start on the coming year’s initiatives. God willing, we want to one day host an annual dinner for our February Just Love Project so we can really thank our supporters correctly. To date, we have not figured out the best way to provide your meal though! 😉

Last year we had goals to grow our volunteer support, raise awareness, pin down a location with which to teach our American Life and Language Classes from, invite more nationalities of refugees to AR, structure our classes more as far as the basic educational teaching plans, understand and connect more with local agencies that can offer assistance in our areas of need, update our website and pull together some marketing material to better explain who we are and save funds for purchasing our own large van to help with transportation needs. These are just a few of our goals and I’m happy to say we have done very well at pretty much reaching these goals. We could not have done this without YOUR help and prayers! Thank you.

We have a beautiful new website with brochures done by Five 17 Design (five17design.com)! Thank you so much Keith and Chris! We trust that the website will better help us to express who we are, what we are about and what we are currently doing. We’ve got some great looking signs too that match our website graphics and will really help us when we have opportunities to visit churches, groups or businesses to share about our Asha’s Refuge mission.

Our American Life and Language Classes and client base are full with refugees from several different nationalities: Somalia, Ethiopia, Bhutan (Napal), Burundi, Tanzania, the Congo, Iraq, Sudan and more. We have yet to see anyone from Syria but have felt we may at some point. Our classes have been blessed with about 25-30 rotating volunteers that have majorly helped to bring structure and better organization. We have even had a lot of success getting the teacher and student ratio down to almost one on one at times. This is a huge help to our students both adult and preschool. (I think the preschool class could always use a couple extra hands though to help corral and encourage our energetic children.)

We are currently trying to add a second American Life and Language (ALL) Class day at our Highland Heights Baptist Church location at 675 National. Our students have requested extra educational time and need it. Highland Heights Church has thankfully and graciously welcomed us again to have this Tuesday class in their building. We plan to add the class day on Tuesdays but cannot move forward with this extra day until we have enough committed volunteer teachers and a van driver. Our Thursday class volunteers are doing well and have become a tight group. We trust that God will bring to us another closely knit large group of volunteers and volunteer coordinators for the coming Tuesday class. He always provides and it is truly sweet to watch His blessings unfold.

We are still short on the van funds but we do have a van savings account with about $500 in it. A lot of our donations are tangible items that go directly to those refugees in need. We do receive some occasional financial donations but very few are monthly commitments that we can count on in order to begin saving and budgeting for things like an entire van purchase, gas and insurance for the van. We also are always trying to save for our own land and building one day where we can truly have free reign to construct as we need but for now our land and building needs are met. Our financial donations have very much helped us directly support refugee critical needs and have assisted some with our monthly low budget but required operational expenses.

Our prayer is that as the organization grows that we are also blessed to be a part of growing God’s kingdom by helping with Christ like love towards ALL people: refugee, our multi-cultural community, volunteer or supporting friend. We have a BIG vision that includes land, basic education classes, temporary housing, gardens, job training facilities, driving education paths and much, much more. We pray we will continue connecting even better with our community going forward. We are hopeful for more opportunities to share with others about our Mission…let us know if you want us to come speak to your group so that we may get more people on board “helping us help them”.

Also, feel free to help us get a good start on our 2015 initiatives by making a Just Love donation…(click on the little red heart on our website’s main page – it’s towards the bottom beside the Facebook logo symbol or click the donate button on the left tabs) or simply mail us a check to 1035 Winchester Blvd., Suite A216, Colliervile, TN. 38017.

Thank you again for a great 2014 year and even more for helping us reach the nations for Jesus by first…Just Loving. (1 Corinthians 13:8). We look forward to the year 2015!!