ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONSImproving the Odds of Global Justice

Challenges of the Justice Worker and the Justice-Focused NPO

The challenges are substantial because the justice worker or a new NPO focused on justice issues is not typically birthed out of larger well-established and well-funded churches or organizations. Therefore he or she not only lacks all of the regular economic, structural, and cultural support of traditional missions, but the very support they need is already allocated to the older missions model. Almost always this forces them out on their own, starting from scratch, underfunded, under-equipped, and sustained only by a heart to do justice and an entrepreneurial spirit. This gives place to a broad base of needs.

Issachar International Helps Implement Solutions and Systems

There is a significant number of individuals in the business world who, having achieved economic success, are now in pursuit of a life of significance. This quest has led them beyond writing checks into new arenas by taking their lifelong developed and God-blessed talents and skill sets and investing them in and through the lives of others, especially the younger generation.

Bridges Between the Business Community and Justice Workers

One of our goals is to build bridges between the justice community and our corporate relationships by providing contexts for friendship, counseling, mentoring and eventually funding or cooperative economic endeavors. Issachar International will be the overseer and administrator of all joint projects, thus providing relational as well as project accountability.

Where more direct involvement is desired; mentoring relationships or sponsorships could take on the following characteristics:

Building a history of understanding the justice worker’s values, history and vision via reading and interacting in the web arena. I feel this will be a great way for a business minded person to gain a candid bird’s eye view of the potential relationship.
Inviting justice workers to speak in their homes, churches, or at their marketplace meetings.
Providing a place for the justice worker to get some rest and recuperation. This could be in their home, vacation house or sponsoring a mini vacation.
On site visits to the worker’s projects in order to gain compassion and insight. This would provide an opportunity to offer advice and investigate the potential of cooperative ventures.
Participating in the national and regional gatherings.

Successful Business People Use Direct Skill Sets to Contribute

Currently Issachar International is in an expansion phase looking to the future by beginning to network business mentors with justice workers to provide the following:

1. Leadership Development

Life coaching
Business mentoring
Management training and team building
Training and Graduate School

2. Administrative Support

Business plan consulting
Legal assistance
NPO/501(c) 3 compliance
Technical support

3. Funding and Fiscal Management

Grant writing
Budget
Sustainability models
Sponsor networking

DAVID & PEGGY FITZPATRICK ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL FOUNDERS

From the beginning of our marriage, our dinner table has created an ongoing forum for thoughts and ideas from each member of our family as well as others joining us. Any of us who are parents understand well that through the lives of our children our own worlds are enriched, challenged and expanded. Our lives have been no exception.

As our energies were poured into the well-being of the church and into the defining and refining of a fresh and current church model, our children were on a journey of their own. Our second-born announced at the age of eight that she would be adopting orphans and possibly running an orphanage. She never wavered from this vision. Our first, always one to ponder and sift through the status quo, began early to ask, “If the church is about Jesus, and Jesus is about the poor, why is the church not about the poor more than about all these other subjects of church life?” Hmm, good question. What to do, and how?

Of course we had this person or that over the years spending a season with us in our home, from new believers to those with significant trauma that left them mentally unstable or even homeless. We did short term trips to less fortunate places to help with a construction project or visit the poor. But this was not enough to satisfy him, and he sought out the people living under Nashville’s bridges, and then with nothing but the clothes on his back and his backpack, the villagers left in the wake of the Serbian war, eventually on to the laborers of India, and always in those teen years, our dinner table was the gathering place for our children’s friends, who were together forging their own version of what it meant to follow Jesus.

They had a passion and a quest; we had a roof and a table, and so began the early dawning of what is now Issachar International. Some of the individuals featured on this site were among those around our Shabbat dinner table, and others are more recent friends, but born out of these days was the warmth and support that has culminated in the vision statement of Issachar International.

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CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Improving the Odds of Global Justice

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DAVID & PEGGY FITZPATRICK ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL FOUNDERS

WRITINGS AND MUSINGS