Life With Hope

Life With Hope is a program for families struggling with the devastating effects of AIDS. As our staff spends time visiting needy families personally, we make decisions about who we believe cannot keep surviving without intervention – and those are the people we choose to begin pooling our resources to help. First, we find clothing and food here through donations locally (and our own closets) to tide them by. But, secondly, we make their needs known in order to get them sponsored through Align Ministries.

Sponsorships and funds donated through Align are first used to provide food and basic necessities for families that are either being affected by AIDS, or experiencing extreme poverty that they cannot lift themselves out of. If they are not in school, or we feel the situation needs it, we take their children in for schooling at no cost, and their stories are reported to Align, who seeks to find not only sponsors to provide for the family’s food costs ($30/mo), but for the children’s tuition fees for the term ($50 for the first term, and $25 for consecutive terms).

Once families have begun to regain their physical strength, donations through Align provide BPC with the ability to distribute microfinance loans of $25-$200, that help families to begin running their own, sustainable businesses. A grace period is given to those who cannot at once afford to begin paying their loans. Others are expected to begin immediately making small payments of $5-$10 per month immediately. In many cases, families are taken off sponsorship as soon as their loans are distributed. Others are still struggling and are given a longer period of support until they are generating enough income to begin providing regularly for food, schooling and medical bills. In a few cases of extreme illness, families are kept on ongoing support, without a microfinance loan. In these situations, the end goal is to lift families out of complete desperation, and keep them stabilized.