ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL: ENTREPRENEURSHIP EMPOWERS JUSTICE

Entrepreneurship Provides Sustainability

Justice often deals with rights violations, economic marginalization or the outright enslavement of the 27 million people in the world today. In fighting for justice you not only fight oppressors but you also enable, equip, and empower individuals to be self sustaining. This naturally leads one into economic endeavors. This entrepreneurial core value of Issachar International is imbedded into all of our workers and projects.

In the spirit of social entrepreneurship, Issachar International will also be focused on establishing business opportunities for the sole purpose of sustaining particular projects the field reps are involved in. An example of a currently operative for-profit endeavor is the Mennonite Central Committee. They have a nationwide chain of stores called 10,000 Villages. They purchase fairly traded work of native artists in less developed countries and sell them in the west through their stores. This model also provides educational and training components through which field reps can develop their skill sets.

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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ENTREPRENEURSHIP EMPOWERS JUSTICE

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DAVID & PEGGY FITZPATRICK ISSACHAR INTERNATIONAL FOUNDERS

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