Next Steps that ANYONE can take

Learn

• Reading materials
• The Revolution: A Field Manual for Changing Your World, Wallis, Haseltine, Beckmann, Smith
• The AIDS Crisis: What We Can Do , Dortzback, Long
• The Hope Factor: Engaging the Church in the HIV/AIDS Crisis , Yamamori, Dageforde, Bruner

• Websites
• www.1000wells.com
• www.africare.org
• www.allafrica.com
• www.bloodwatermission.com
• www.data.org
• www.one.org
• www.oxfam.org
• www.worldrelief.org
• www.worldvision.org

Pray

• Pray for organizations fighting the battle against AIDS.

• Pray for your church’s role.

• Pray for your role as an individual and family.

• Pray as a family. Cut and paste a picture from a waiting child listing to make bookmarks for your entire family. Commit as a family to praying for this child every time you open your book.

• Pray while waiting in line. Go online to find a waiting child listing ( www.adoptuskids.org or www.rainbowkids.com). Print out a picture and description of a waiting child and tape it to your dashboard. Every time you find yourself waiting – in traffic, at a stoplight, in the drive-thru – pray for this child.

• Pray as a small group. Organize an evening prayer vigil on behalf of the orphan and waiting child. Invite other churches to join you as well. You can pray for children all over the world or you can ask your local foster care office for pictures and names of waiting children in your city to pray for.

Give

• Donate your old cell phones. CARE and Collective Good International are working together on a major mobile phone recycling initiative. It’s designed to capture idle mobile phones in North America and redeploy them, solving an environmental problem, raising funds for CARE and bridging the digital div

• Research and find an agency in Africa that really hits home for you, then make a monthly commitment to them and yourself to give back.

• Build an orphanage—it’s not as hard as it sounds. Visit www.worldorphans.org to learn how a gift of $4,000 to $8,000 can cover the building costs of a new orphanage in one of dozens of countries. These homes are built in conjunction with a local church. Consider raising this money as a small group, Sunday school class, or youth ministry.

• Give financially to a family in the process of adoption. See www.shaohannahshope.com and www.lifeintl.org for more information about financial assistance for adoptive families.

• Drink only water for two weeks. Save all your change for a month. Rent a video instead of going to the movies. Donate that money.

Do

• Visit the original "click-to-give" Internet site ( http://www.thehungersite.com) started in 1999 to combat hunger one click at a time. Each daily click is free to the visitor, and provides the value of 1.1 cups of staple food. 100% of site advertising is used to feed the hungry through partners Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest.

• Use the search engine www.goodsearch.com. Organizations like Compassion International, Blood:Water Mission, World Relief, World Vision, Oxfam America, Africans Orphaned by AIDS, and Africa AIDS Education & Prevention Organization Sierra Leone Project, among many others, benefit from each search done on their behalf.

• Volunteer with Feed My Starving Children packing meals. Their approach is simple: volunteers pack nutritious meals made up of rice, soy, vitamins and dehydrated vegetables, and we partner with relief organizations worldwide to distribute these meals to starving children. You can spend donate 2 hours of your time individually, as a family or with your Community Group, and help put together meals that will feed children all over the world.

• Organize a drive to collect school supplies or shoes in your church or community group. To learn more visit www.gainusa.org (click on “Projects”) or www.shoesfororphansouls.org.

• If you’re a parent, look for a cool “African experience” to share as a family.

• If you’re a student, do a research paper on Africa.

• Go to www.compassion.com or www.worldvision.com and choose to sponsor a child (you can even plug in your children’s birthdates and find children who were born on the same day). Then involve them in saving every month for their support (which is only $32 and $35 respectively), and then have them write these children and become pen pals.

• Host a Global Dinner and share child sponsorship opportunities.

• Create a personalized web page and friends asking them to sponsor a child.

• Head to www.tenthousandvillages.com. Here you’ll find a website filled with beautiful things, everything from jewelry to stationery to toys & games, created by artisans all over the world who will benefit greatly from your business.

• Visit www.samaritanspurse.org and click on their Gift Catalog. You can donate to this organization in amounts as small as just $4 to provide a needy child with healthy milk for a week or $9 to purchase a packet of seeds for a family in another country to start their own vegetable garden.

• Go to The Gap. All (PRODUCT) RED items will give 50% of the net proceeds to fighting AIDS in Africa by providing medicine that will help pregnant women prevent the spread of the disease to their babies.

• Compose a letter to the editor of your local newspaper or to your favorite magazine telling them about an issue that is important to you or highlighting an organization that is doing well in your community or on the other side of the world.

• Go to http://www.house.gov/, type in your zip code, and you’ll be given your representatives’ names. You can sometimes even email them right then and there. Don’t be intimidated, just tell them what’s on your mind.

• Join the AIDS Walk for Orphans. Walk 6,000 steps for the 6,000 children orphaned daily on World AIDS Day, December 1.

• You can give a child a home through international adoption. To learn more about adoption, download Welcome Home: Eight Steps to Adoption, or to explore other information and identify key adoption agencies at www.HopeForOrphans.com; or contact the Adoption Resource Connection at http://www.arc-adopt.org for more information.

Go

• Go on a missions' trip to an orphanage. You can go on a construction trip, a medical trip or a trip to help conduct vacation bible school. Taking your family on an orphanage mission trip can be life changing. Visit the following websites for more information: www.gainusa.org, www.helporphans.org, www.hopechest.org.