World Relief Celebrates National Volunteer Week
The relief and development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals is celebrating its National Volunteer Week this week in recognition of its tens of thousands of volunteers in the U.S. and overseas.
Worldwide, more than 31,000 local church and community volunteers form the core of Baltimore-based World Relief’s health, child development and refugee programs.
“World Relief fulfills a prophetic role in calling local churches to care for their brothers and sisters and to love their community at large,” commented World Relief’s Suzanne Wilson in Mozambique.
According to World Relief, the agency’s volunteer network overseas involves over 27,600 people, representing thousands of local church congregations.
“In Africa and South Asia, World Relief volunteers often are as poor materially as the people they help,” the agency stated. “Yes they are incredibly generous with the little they have.”
World Relief reports that through its Mobilizing for Life program, church volunteers care for thousands of AIDS-affected families, and through its volunteer-driven Maternal & Child Health Care Group model, the agency is enabled to reach tens of thousands of vulnerable households.
Trained community and church volunteers also run Child Development programs for tens of thousands of children and teens in Cambodia, Mozambique and Sierra Leone.
Currently, World Relief is at work on behalf of evangelical churches in the Congo distributing resettlement kits containing seeds, hoes, seed protection food and household items to 21,000 of the most vulnerable families in Masisi and Rutshuru Territories – far exceeding the original target of 9,000 families.
The agency also works in more than 20 countries in relief and development through micro finance, disaster response, refugee resettlement, food security, child development, and maternal and child health, in addition to HIV/AIDS prevention and care.
