Levi Benkert's Blog, page 4
May 23, 2019
Host an Elevate Orphan event with us!
Want to share this story with YOUR community??
With the launch of our new child sponsorship page, Elevate Orphan, we have been blown away by the incredible response and the supporters who have stepped up and generously signed up to sponsor our children at Bring Love In!
We want to continue to grow this community and need your help to do it!
We launched this child sponsorship platform to connect donors to individual children. Our desire in creating this platform is to grow this community, share this story of hope far and wide!!
We think it’s a simple and straightforward message, and hope to share it to communities all around to continue to expand and raise support for each of these amazing children.
Want to learn more how YOUR community, church, class, group can host an EO event??
Contact us!
Check out these photos from an Elevate Orphan event last month hosted by our supporters at Journey Church in Bozeman, Montana!
3 new orphans get Forever Families!
We have exciting news…
The Bring Love In Family is growing!!
Pictured: Our director. Thomas Abebaw with the three new girls joining the Bring Love In family!
That’s right, Bring Love In has 3 NEW KIDS that will be joining 3 of our Forever Families!
All three of these children are from the same government orphanage our children in our Forever Families came from. Everyone at Bring Love In, our moms, our staff and all the children are so excited to see these new children integrate and become a part of their new families.
We are so thrilled to share this news and humbled to see God using Bring Love In to care for more children and give them homes, a mother, a family! How incredible is that?? We are so grateful to have you a part of this journey with us.
Want to sponsor a Bring Love In child?
Check out our new child sponsorship site, Elevate Orphan, to see all our children’s profile and learn more…
Visit Elevate Orphan!
The wait is over!!
The. Wait. Is. Over!
After 10 years of creating new families from widows and orphans in Ethiopia…
We are launching a way for you to sponsor an individual child in one of our Forever Families!
You might not know this but…
Jessie and I co-founded another orphan care ministry in Ethiopia…
It was actually the reason we moved there way back in 2009. We had heard of a tribe in the South who were killing some of their children because of superstitious beliefs. We wanted to do something, so we moved to a little town called Jinka and partnered with a local couple Lale and Gido, and together we built Drawn From Water, an orphan care center to care for those kids.
I dug into our old photos and found this gem from our time living in Jinka. It’s crazy how fast kids grow up! But that is a story for another time.
Fast forward 10 years and the organization is now called Omo Hope, and we care for more than 50 children who were formerly labeled “Mingi” or cursed by their tribe. To us, these children are an incredible blessing! These children range in age from 4-16 and are the most wonderful, loving kids you will ever meet.
Neat right?! We love the work that we get to do!
But, wait there is more!
Today Omo Hope and Bring Love In are joining forces to create a new child sponsorship platform called: Elevate Orphan.
Literally the number one question we get asked is “Can I sponsor one of these kids?” and until now our answer at both Bring Love In and Omo Hope was that you could support the organization, or a family, but not an individual child. Today all of that changes.
You can now sponsor an individual child!
Meet: Elevate / Orphan
A child sponsorship platform, where you can:
Choose a child. Change a life. Build a leader.
Are you ready to make a lasting difference in the life of a child?
Check out this video above to learn more about Elevate Orphan!
Click here to visit Elevate Orphan and choose a child to sponsor
What does this change mean if I already am giving to Bring Love In?
That’s great! Nothing has changed and the ongoing organizations baseline needs are still there. We hope you will continue to give as you always have, and that our sponsorships will allow us to grow to help even more children.
Trips to Bring Love In
We are looking for churches or friend groups that want to go to Ethiopia and have an amazing time serving the people there and showing the love of God.
We will plan the trip alongside your group to tailor it to fit the skills you offer and meet the needs on the ground. We will book accommodations, transportation, meals, and translators.
We are so excited to plan trips with a purpose and meet a true need!
What a great way to experience the culture, the people, use your skills, and make a difference.
Learn more about Bring Love In!
Summer Camps
A VBS summer camp trip in the capital city of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa where our Forever Families live! Working with the kids of Bring Love In during their summer break.
Educational and enrichment trips
Come in and teach enrichment development courses and unique skills to progress the bright futures of the kids of Bring Love In!
Staff Training
Bringing experts to the staff in Ethiopia to encourage and equip them to care for the children in their care. The most requested training is trauma care, counseling, teaching/tutoring, and Bible training. We believe the best way to help the kids is to train the staff!
So… is your church or friend group ready to take an amazing trip to Ethiopia? Do you have a skill that will be helpful to the people there?
If the answer is yes, send us an email and we will begin the planning process! Or if it’s just you, and you would like to join one of these trips, keep an eye out for an announcement of the upcoming trips 
New Bring Love In Boys’ Home!
We now have a new boys’ home!
7 of our oldest teenage boys:
Eyosias
Endalew
Gemechu
Moges
Yebeltal
Dawit
and Shwaferaw
are all moving to a new home in our Forever Families’ neighborhood!
They will be just a street away from the rest of the homes of Bring Love In, just a few doors down from their Forever Families.
The new boys’ home is an exciting opportunity for these teenagers to grow and develop into men with the help of our newest staff member, a christian man of God and trained counselor and mentor for the boys to be a full time leader and influence in their lives! The home will have a mom and and an aunt just like out other homes, but the boys will be in a new environment and have the ability to learn from their mentor as they become young adults and men of God!
We had an incredible and loyal donor sign up to cover the costs of the new home and our amazing staff is getting everything ready, house furnished and set up for the boys to move in!
The boys are all very excited for the new house and know it doesn’t change their Forever Families still being their family.
February 4, 2019
New Omo Hope building updates!
January 18, 2019
How WO dog toys in America are helping support Bring Love In’s Forever Families in Ethiopia!
Hi there! Allie Jeffers here with Bring Love In Donor Relations.
Today, we want to tell all of you our amazing community and supporters about one of the awesome partnerships that we have been so blessed by over the years. We love sharing the stories of people all around who are as inspired as we are by this Forever Family model and how they are supporting this vision of Bring Love In!
This is WO Founder, Josh Allen.
Josh returned to Montana from a trip to Ethiopia in the fall of 2012. He had spent time in local villages and in Addis Ababa (the capital city of Ethiopia) working with widows and orphans. He was astonished at how difficult it was to get resources and supplies for regular health care and nutrition to the area. While there, he felt called to commit to ensuring widows & orphans had an adequate source of home-cooked meals and nutrition.
During his first trip to Ethiopia, he connected with Bring Love In. The vision of caring for orphans and widows tied in perfectly with BLI’s vision in Ethiopia.
After seeing the Forever Family model, he was inspired to come home and see what part of the organization he could make an impact in. Since then, we have had the privilege of WO’s support and coming alongside this community to care for these former orphans and widows in their created Forever Families!
Here’s how it happened:
Eight years prior to Josh’s trip, he and his wife started a local pet supply store in Bozeman, MT, called Dee-O-Gee.
Dee-O-Gee sells high quality, made in the USA, pet supplies and food for conscious pet owners.
Josh decided that he would dedicate a percentage of the sales to the purchase of nutritional aid for Widows & Orphans in Ethiopia; and thus started WO (W for widows and O for orphans). WO’s support covers the cost of lunches in our Forever Families.
At of the end of 2018, WO has successfully provided over 30,000 meals for our Forever Families at Bring Love In and in Ethiopia. How awesome is that??
CREATING CHANGE
Each WO product purchased directly funds the cost of 2 lunches for our Forever Families of BLI.
DOES YOUR DOG ‘THINK GLOBAL’?
Josh’s idea was simple: What if you bought your dog a new toy AND help provide lunches for the Forever Families of Bring Love IN in Ethiopia at the same time?! It’s a true WIN-WIN.
We’ve been so blessed and grateful to be partnered with Josh’s company WO, to help feed the Forever Families of Bring Love In, thereby creating a tangible change – daily, in this organization.
Check out WO and their awesome products. Josh has made a special discount code for the BLI community to grab some awesome dog toys while simultaneously supporting our Forever Families!
Click the link below to shop the products and use the code: “BLI20” to receive 20% off any item!!
December 3, 2018
How you can support Omo Hope this giving season!!
June 27, 2018
How Ethiopia came to be the fastest growing economy in the world…
We want to open this post with a quick statistic for you to digest. When you read it, decide what you think the #1 reason behind this change is…
26% of children born in the developing world in 1960 died before their 5th birthday. Today less than 5% die before they turn 5.
Now digest that. Think to yourself and then decide what you believe the reason that things have gotten so dramatically better is. What’s the big answer here? What could be the meat behind what caused such a dramatic change. I could use all sorts of other statistics, incomes, jobs, education, etc… But this one does a good job of showing the dramatic difference that the developing world has undergone.
I would bet that most of you guessed it was because of aid, or the efforts of rich countries who have chosen to lend a hand to the poor.
But it turns out, it’s not at all.
Solving poverty is a challenge that our generation has the ability to take on, and Bring Love In intends to do everything in our power to help change the world in this regard.
Why is aid not the answer?
There have been lots of studies who tried to find correlation between humanitarian giving in a country and the resulting uptick in incomes or productivity for the recipients. And not one study has been able to find a direct link.
Two big questions come up right?
1. What then did make such a huge difference between 1960 and today?
2. And why should this be the motivation to give?
The first is the most exciting to tackle, because it really is the root of our heart and drive at Bring Love In in the city of Addis Ababa, it is the driving hope for the work that is being done through our Forever Families. The answer we believe is this:
Ethiopians
Yep, the #1 reason why Ethiopia is finally developing, why the developing world is coming out of poverty, is because the people there have decided for themselves that the time is now to move ahead! Now they have a long way to go but one day, the people of the country agreed on a goal.
Rise out of poverty.
When it comes to places that are making a difference, countries who are on a roll, heading the right direction, I think you would be hard pressed to find one better than Ethiopia. Almost every year out of the past 10 years Ethiopia has been in the top 5 fastest growing economies in the world, THAT’S INCREDIBLE!
Lots of change all of a sudden and at the core of it is not us, it’s not the people who are reaching out to help who made it happen, it’s the people there, in their own country, deciding enough is enough and that they are ready for their turn, those are the ones who will rise out of poverty!
Why give? Because it does help, it does make a difference!
Just be strategic about it, give where it counts in a way that counts…
That is what Bring Love In is about, helping where it counts, taking the poorest of the poor, orphans and widows, giving them the love and care they need, and building up future leaders so that this incredibly fast moving country keeps moving in the right direction, and so that when it does find itself in a place where it has eliminated poverty than it has a solid biblical foundation to build on.
And what’s more, it’s a concept that encourages growth from within a family unit, within their roots of their country, their culture.
The concept of the Forever Family is an amazing solution for Ethiopia’s orphan crisis,especially now, as out-of-country adoptions have been closed.
We believe in the beautiful unfolding of this story of redemption, this story of wrong’s being made right and broken things being made whole again, and look forward to walking alongside our Forever Families to support them as they continue towards a bright future of Hope in Ethiopia.
So why give, why be apart of this change, and support Bring Love In?
Bring Love In offers a beautiful concept of renewal for the family unit and a structure to give a child a family, a home and a bright future to become a leader in this revolutionary time for Ethiopia…
and we need supporters like you to come alongside us!
It IS changing! And you CAN help! Want to be apart of this amazing family?
April 16, 2018
A strong family foundation
Today, we want to look back and see how far we have come and be amazed, we want to take a moment to express the heart and the drive behind this whole organization, this community that is always at the forefront of everything we do.
It’s truly incredible to think of the time, effort and support that allows us to do this work within the lives of these children in our Forever Families.
For us, the concept of Bring Love In, this concept of taking 2 things that were once broken, a widow and a child without the love of parents and family, and joining them in a home, in sustaining support and love is not just an idea…We get to see it manifested in the day to day lives of our “moms” and children within the 9 Forever Families placed around the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
We feel strongly that this is more than an organization; this is a community. This is a family. And no matter how you are apart of it, no matter what part you have to play in the lives of these children, you’re in the Bring Love In family with us, and we couldn’t be more grateful for all of you that choose to walk alongside us, the wonderful staff and moms we have in Addis Ababa to bring hope for these 57 children!
Because when we talk about our heart behind this project, the drive and desire to give these children a future, a future full of possibility and opportunity, we believe in this hope ourselves, we have it anchored in us, deeply rooted in the faith that we are called to be apart of this community, to not just watch these children grow and strive towards their full potential, but to aid them, to come alongside them and provide however we can to help them get there.
And what’s more, we are in this for the long haul, our mom’s are in it for the long haul, our staff as well. And not only for the sake of seeing children taken from orphanages and placed in families, but to see those children raised up as the leaders who will turn the tides on what created so many orphans in the first place.
We are always excited at the fact that we get to dig deep into the goodness of what is in store for these children of Bring Love In, we know that through the support of their families, they are receiving sustaining and abounding love to encourage them towards a beautiful and bright future.
We are able to rest in the confidence of knowing the moms of each of our Forever Family homes love these children as if they were there own, that they pour their time and efforts into making sure each child knows that they are worth it, they are able to achieve more than the beaten and battered world had in store for them. We make sure that the Bring Love In children are rooted in the truth that they are capable of greatness in their communities, they are able to be leaders in their country, to take what’s been given to them, to move forward from their past experiences of pain and hurt and use this love and support of family as a direction and guide of where they’d like to see their country move ahead to!
So it is always with hearts full of gratefulness, gratitude and amazement that we get to be in this community, this family unit called Bring Love In. We see the providential plan for each of these kiddos being manifested at every new season as they grow into the leaders they are becoming. And we thank you for joining us on this journey!
Our aim is to always keep you in the loop, give you updates and photos and and tell you the stories of all the incredible work that is being done within each of these 9 homes in Ethiopia.
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