Moving Forward

Todays Prayer Meeting was wonderful! Thanks to all of you that came and participated - both your input and insight are valued.



I wanted to update everyone else on our plans for moving forward at Country Garden Apartments. After months of careful consideration, months of prayer, months of visiting, and months of brainstorming, we are finally going to put it all into practice again! And I couldn't be more excited. Not only are we movinig forward with prayer, planning and God's leading on our side - we also have the trial and error experiences and knowledge from our 2007 -2008 efforts at the complex! The timing is right, and its upon us!



Here is what we discussed this morning:



We will be hosting (in our apt. 103G) a reading group for the kids of Country Garden Apartments (limited to ages 4-10). It will begin Saturday, February 7th, from 10:00 - 11:00 am. We will begin our time with the kids by serving cereal as breakfast. Then we will have a time of sit down reading to the kids. After that we move to a time of craft, or activity or something. Eventually, we'd like to see a library of sorts that the kids could check out books from.



We will limit the # of children to 20, so that the time spent with the kids will be manageable, safe, and meaningful. We will have 3-4 adults inside the apartment during the hour along with 3-4 adults outside the apartment (and around the door). (Eventually we'd like to hand-select volunteers from the complex to help us.) Every volunteer will have to go through a background check. We will have a simple registration and check-in/out system in place. To register (the first time a child comes) a parent/guardian must come with the child to fill out an information sheet on the child. If the parent does not come with the child to register him/her we will go with the child back to the apartment and ask them to fill out the form. (There will be a waiting list, should more than 20 kids come one week. This way there will be equity in participation priveleges.)



We need a cleaning system in place, where the apartment is cleaned on a regular basis and therefore we need a good base of volunteers who are willing to do this on a monthly basis.



Tomorrow morning (Jan. 11) at church, there will be a sign-up sheet in every classroom for those who are willing to volunteer in any capacity.



January 31st we will be knocking doors and spreading the news of our new weekly event to the tenants. We will also give a flyer to the apartment manager (Kendra Throgmartin) to hand out to the tenants promoting it a couple of weeks in advance.



If you have any advice, input, questions, concerns, or prayers you would like to voice, then feel free to click on comments and have at it!



I want to remind all of you engaged in this of our mission and focus as we move forward -



"We are dedicated to partnering with our friends and neighbors at the Country Garden Apartment Complex in building authentic community."