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We are delighted to share with you an invitation to our 1st annual Thanks Giving Dinner: Colors of Grace and would be thrilled for you and your family and friends to join us. Gentle Hands would like to use this opportunity, to thank you for your generous support of our ministry.
Your support has allowed us to deliver holistic therapeutic residential care and rehabilitation services to children who have been rescued from physical danger, are severely ill or have been abandoned or abused. This helps us fulfil our goal of meeting the individual needs of every child in our care. This includes providing medical care, proper nutrition, education, recreation and case management. We surround our children with a Godly, family style home environment where they are supported, safe and loved. In our care they receive the healing they desperately need. Our children learn to love, trust and to form healthy attachments that will enable them to adapt when they are reunited with their family, placed in foster care or adopted by their forever family.
Entering our 18th year of operation, you will have the opportunity to learn about the life-changing impact our ministry has on the children we serve. The event will begin at 6:00 pm with dinner, followed by ballet, taekwondo and music performances. The dress is casual, invitation attached.
Hope you can make it!
Ticket price:
P1, 500.00 to cover food and venue
Inquiries/RSVP to Elle Catihanan at (+63)9171 08 3553
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New Partnership: Progression Athletics
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Gentle Hands is excited to announce our new partnership with Progression Athletics, an NGO that connect with at-risk youth through sports and offer them the tools for a brighter future.. Progression athletics has generously come on board to help support Gentle Hand's Taekwondo Program.
Progression Athletics International was founded by Shane Hanson in 2011 with a vision to influence children positively around the world through athletics. Shane has been on numerous humanitarian trips around the globe since 2006 and wanted to use his personal experiences along with his collegiate background to create a platform that changes lives. During his trips, he saw an overwhelming need to help children that were abused and neglected. These children often do not have control over their unfortunate life circumstances.
Today, Progression Athletics uses sports as a platform to reinforce the nurturing and motivating environment that all children CRAVE for a healthy childhood, and ultimately, a successful future.
Gentle Hand's Taekwondo Program is an integral part of our holistic therapeutic care for our children. Taekwondo is one of the great mediums through which empowerment and healing enters the life of a child and gives him or her a greater chance of success and purpose.
We are so thankful for Progression Athletics' support and we know their help will have a real and meaningful difference to the lives of children in our care.
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The Kingdom of Heaven
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In July of this year Alex and I decided to take a trip to the Philippines and volunteer at Gentle Hands.
What we experienced that first day is hard to put down on paper, but that six story house in metro Manila was so filled with the love of God our hearts could barely handle it. The place is organized chaos. Over one hundred and twenty kids under one roof. Gentle Hands is a refuge for children who have been born into unsafe situations and have often been forced to live on the streets and fend for themselves. Gentle Hands offers these sometimes very sick, beaten, tortured and unwanted children a safe place to call home and experience the love of God for the very first time.
Charity Graff is the Executive Director, and second generation missionary in the Philippines. She has devoted her life to the healing, placement and parenting of these children. She frantically runs around the house coddling a premature baby in her arms, while simultaneously and personally loving, instructing and teaching every child that calls Gentle Hands home. She has the true mother's heart of God and has implemented such an amazing place of stability and healing for each and every one of these children. Each child is personally assigned a full time staff member who is deeply devoted, day in and day out, to that child's healing and restoration. These men and women, come every single day and seek to provide trusted bonds for each of these children. Showing them that they have someone who cares, someone who will not hurt them and someone who deeply longs to see their healing and restoration.
Alex and I got to spend eight days at Gentle Hands, we got to see the highs and lows of each child, we got to hear their stories and experience a little window into their lives. We played hard, loved hard, worshipped hard and poured every last bit of our hearts to these children. No one should ever have to experience in a lifetime what these little ones have experienced at such a young age, but to be surrounded by these children every night, sitting on the floor and blissfully worshipping the Lord with all of their hearts is something that cannot be ignored. We have never experienced the love of the Lord so immensely, so tangibly and so audibly as we did at Gentle Hands. It brings the reality home that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children like these.
We encourage you to look into Gentle Hands, but more importantly to just pray for these kids-for a forever home, for health, for a sense of calm, for the memories of torture to fade and for the constant reminder of how loved they are.
Alexandra Shratter & Kevin Sellon
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