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February 21, 2023 TecAdmin

GOING TO WASHINGTON D.C. WITH 2,000 CROSSES!

On January 20, 2018, Dan Haas, in partnership with Greg Zanis of Crosses for Losses, will be placing 2,000 crosses on the southwest quadrant of the Ellipse Park across the street from the White House in Washington D. C.  This visual demonstration of homicides in or nation is entitled, “America Never Forgotten”.

The purpose of this event is to:

  1. Support the families of homicide victims by offering the comfort found in prayer and the power of the cross. The Love of God. The Peace of God. The Hope of God.
  2. Identify murder as a moral and spiritual problem that must be addressed with moral and spiritual solutions.
  3. Call our nation to prayer, repentance, and collaborative, community action to stop the violence in our nation.

Greg Zanis is making crosses from homicides spanning the country.  After a one hour program beginning at noon, Dan Haas will lead prayer for the cities of Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, and Sutherland Springs.

A FUTURE AND A HOPE FOUNDATION

Thank you for visiting A Future and A Hope Foundation website.  Please review the various initiatives the Foundation has started since May of 2015.  With over 35 years of active ministry in the Aurora area, many dynamic partnerships have been established that lay the groundwork for substantive change to occur in the lives of many who currently have little hope for the future.  Visit this site frequently and be encouraged as the Foundation shares the stories of positive changes occurring, one life at a time.

This morning a new day dawned in your life. You may have seen the sunrise.

A new day provides you with new opportunities, new decisions, and new choices that provide hope for today and a path forward for the future.  Your confidence in your skills and abilities make you excited about life.  However, other people awoke this morning with very little assurance in their skills or abilities. If they live in poverty or live in a neighborhood experiencing high violent crime rates or have recently been released from prison, they may not have any prospects available to them.  Most of their decisions and choices will concern daily subsistence.  It is difficult to have hope or anticipation of a better future when you constantly live in survival mode.

A Future and A Hope Foundation was formed to bring change into hopeless situations. The mission of the Foundation is to empower the Church in urban communities to develop local solutions to the issues of violence reduction, assisting people with employment barriers to find and retain employment and poverty. These three issues present difficult problems in every major city across this nation.  They will not be solved just by a large Federal program. The Foundation believes that a ‘collective impact’ made by local leaders who coordinate and leverage local resources can most effectively reduce poverty, reduce violence, and address employment transition issues.

A ‘collective impact’ in a community is made when leaders from organizations representing various sectors of the community band together to address a specific issue.  Most issues are not one dimensional.  They represent a spectrum or continuum of needs.  A collective impact brings together representatives from local government, law enforcement, business, education, social services, health care, and the faith community.  Each of these sectors can address one or two needs on the continuum of need. Individually they cannot meet every need. Working together they can address the entire spectrum of need on a specific issue.  By design a collective impact is a holistic approach.  It recognizes that all people develop in five spheres of life and it offers assistance to grow in every sphere.  These five spheres of human development are physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual.   A collective impact is the most effective way to solving complex social problems.

The Stanford Social Innovation Review has published a number of excellent articles on collective impacts.  Research shows that a collective impact requires a ‘backbone’ organization to provide basic administrative and leadership resources to function properly.  This is the primary role of A Future and A Hope Foundation in all of its initiatives.  The Foundation will provide a centralized infrastructure, dedicated staff, and a structured process to each of our collective impact initiatives. The process will develop a common agenda among the participating organizations, shared measurements, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities.

At the present, two of our initiatives focus on the three major issues listed in our mission statement.

  • The Employment Transition Initiative has focused ex-offender needs for workforce development training, employment, health care, addiction counseling, transportation and housing. This initiative is being expanded to include other individuals with barriers to employment.
  • The Violence Reduction Initiative focuses on developing prayer strategies that assist in reducing the homicide rate in a community and minister to the families of murder victims. In partnership with Crosses for Losses, the Foundation has just completed a full year (2017) of prayer in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago.

A Future and A Hope Foundation is very excited about the opportunities these initiatives will offer those without hope or a sense of optimism about the future.  Follow our progress and join us in building a better future for the citizens of Aurora, Illinois.