#ZEROby2020 VISION

Please JOIN US on Monday, December 10, to serve children who were removed from home and placed with a relative. We are providing free gifts that we wrap and fun activities for the kiddos. We need to fill 2-hour shifts from 2:30 to 8:30 PM at Saddleback Church in South Irvine.

ANAHEIM, Calif. — An ambitious plan to eliminate the number of vulnerable children without a caring family in Orange County by 2020 using a church-to-church partnership with the county was presented at Vision Night For OC on August 22, 2017.

More than 100 people, representing more than 30 churches, met to discuss the best ways to activate the plan, one that was successfully implemented in the entire nation of Rwanda, organizers said. The presentation of the initiative to help vulnerable children was held at Saddleback Church Anaheim on Tuesday and included six representatives of different areas of child care within the County of Orange program.

“Find a family for every child in OC by 2020 and equip the Church to care for them,” Max McGhee, who is a pastor within the Orphan Care ministry at Saddleback Church, said towards the end of the evening presentation. “It’s that simple,” he said, as he pointed to the initiative’s goal projected on a screen which included “#ZEROby2020.”

The country of Rwanda is approaching its goal of closing all orphanages throughout the country as children are being placed in families out of the orphanage or reunited with their families. Despite this progress, in some orphanages children remain waiting to receive a family – either because finding a willing family is a challenge or often times, there are orphans ages 18 and older who grew up in the orphanage, never learned life skills to survive on their own, and therefore feel unable to leave the orphanage setting. What does all this mean for the work of “Getting to Zero”? Even when orphanages have closed, the task of caring for vulnerable and orphaned children is far from done.

The work of the Orphan Care Initiative goes far beyond simply “closing orphanages.” The tools and training we provide through the work of the local churches in Rwanda is developing a child welfare system for a country that will ensure that no children grow up outside of family care. If you take the case of the United States, we have no orphanages – in their place we have a system for identifying vulnerable and parentless children, sourcing families to foster and adopt them, and training and monitoring those families so that they are successful. If you look at Rwanda through that view, the work has only begun. There is now a stellar example in Western Rwanda – where the Orphan Care Initiative has focused our efforts at the request of the government – of what it looks like to reintegrate children into families well with the wrap around support of the church.