To accomplish anything worthwhile, you must put your shoulder to the wheel and work! While Phase 2 does have financial costs, our primary need is for participation and capacity building partners to ready us for Phase 3.
COSTS
- Industry involvement is in developing a profile/job/task/life‐skill list desired for the unskilled workers needed.
- Phase 2 lead church providing men for the mentoring days, connecting with construction employers, providing rides to work (which are built-in mentoring opportunities). Other churches and groups can provide men to support the lead church team make Phase 2 Launch a huge success.
- Church leaders to assist in Phase 2 and be ready to bring Phase 3 to life!
- Phase 2's financial costs include paying for the Drug Screens, TWIC, Safety Cards and initial Work Clothes for our graduates, between $500-600 per Graduate, and the supply costs for our work projects on the 6 Saturday's we will be mentoring the young men. You can partner with us to meet these needs.
Phase 3 would involve expanding the program to multiple sites. This would require a partnership with community leaders and the mega‐site developers for financial investment to hire staff to coordinate the volunteer work done, design the Phase 3 program details, and train the trainers.
BENEFITS TO THE MEGA-SITE DEVELOPERS
- Investment in developing then hiring local at‐risk population provides tremendous increase in public image of the mega‐projects with various segments of the community, particularly the poor and minority ones.
- Increased supply of needed workers.
- Lowered labor cost via increased retention and increased local labor sourcing.
- We will actually accomplish things, not just have meetings and talk about it.
BENEFITS to the church and the city
- Making Disciples. Think of the men we are reaching out to. Yes, our labor will help them will let them see who Jesus is much more clearly, and our hope is that many will decide to follow Him. Because we are helping change their life in concert with a local church, they will be on a great start to lasting discipleship connected to the church. The hidden power in this plan, however, is to make greater disciples of the many men who are in your church already, waiting to be called out to change the world by integrating what they do now (work) with God’s Mission (make disciples). It is to give them a city-changing mission and watch them lean into it!
- City-Transformation. What would Lake Charles be like if 1,000 young men, currently unemployable for lack of character or lack of models, went from hanging around all day to sustaining a full time job making $30-40k a year? What would happen to crime? Out of wedlock births? Drug use? And if the church helped them get this job, what would happen to participation in Jesus’ Kingdom?
- Real Unity in the Church. What would help race relations more than a Grandmother who fears an orange-jumpsuit future for her grandson, and then she finds him working, making real money, with dignity and self-respect than he never had before? And some (mostly) white people from the other side of town worked with Jesus-followers on her side of town to make all this happen? Can you think of anything that would heal race relations more than that? Me neither. Lake Charles is exactly half black, half white in its population. It is not by accident that God has placed us in this demographic situation with this industrial construction boom at this day.
- Everyone Sees Jesus More Clearly. Jesus prayed this incredible prayer in John 17:20-21, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” Unity in the church comes not simply from having joint meetings of lots of churches, but when the church moves out in ways that line up with God’s Kingdom. We all want the world to believe that God sent Jesus! This little effort can be a part of seeing this happen in our city, our region, and in our day.
