Newsletter #60 – June 7, 2012 – Celebrating 5 Years!

Today we are celebrating five years as an organization! Five years ago, Lauren and I (David) were visiting New York dreaming about how we might help the average person to use their time, talents and passion to impact injustice in the world. We are humbled to have been a part of sparking a desire for change in the hearts of so many through these past five years.  So much has happened in five years. We have traveled across the country, connected with incredible people, have supported great work being done to impact injustice and now we are living in New York, seeing the tangible fruits of our labor in some key partnerships. Thank you to everyone who has been on this journey with us. We could never have dreamed The Love Alliance would take the shape it has today and cannot begin to guess what the next five years will look like. But we are thrilled to take some time to pause and celebrate where this organization has taken us so far. 

In honor of our 5 Year Anniversary and start of our Summer Festival Tour we would like to share with you a video of one of our heroes, a group leader, supporter and someone involved with the organization for the last three years, Owen.  He bravely spoke with us about the person he was and the drastically different person he is since connecting with The Love Alliance and learning to care for others. We gladly would have worked the last five years to affect just one life. Thankfully, Owen is just one story representing many more lives that have been affected by The Love Alliance. Today we celebrate Owen and the many more like him. Click the video below to watch Owen’s Story.

If you would like to celebrate our five year anniversary with us and support the important work we are doing you can make a donation towards this summer’s festival tour allowing us to connect with more people like Owen. We will be traveling to 9 festivals this summer, handing out thousands of educational flyers, having countless conversations all to hopefully spark a fire in countless people’s hearts. Click here to Donate.

As mentioned, we are gearing up for our Summer Festival Tour. Most of the information was mentioned last month, but to quickly recap. We are scheduled to travel to 8 more multi-day festivals around the country to promote The Love Alliance and the issues we represent. This month, Chris and I will be traveling to Ichthus Festival (June 20-23) and Owen will join us at Creation Festival (June 27-30). For more details and our schedule click here. We could also still use some more volunteers at all the festivals. Reply to this email if you are attending any of these festivals and would like to help.

We will be promoting our Give Shoes. Give Love. campaign with Soles4Souls this summer as well as traveling and partnering with LET GOd Work. We will be raffling off 4 Paul Frank Bicycles and a new i-Pad with LET GOd Work. Simply stop by the booth at any of the festivals to sign up for the free raffle!

Speaking of Give Shoes. Give Love. The cast of TV Land’s “The Exes” (Donald Faison, Wayne Night, Kristen Johnston, Kelly Stables and David Alan Basche) are showing their support for the campaign. Check out the pictures here and join them in your support. For only $7 a month you can provide 7 pairs of shoes to children in need. Click here to watch the video and sign up.

ACTION PROJECT

In celebration of our Five Year Anniversary, this month’s Action Project is to simply celebrate someone who has made a difference in your life and in the world. It can be someone you know or don’t know. Post a picture or story on your social networks, blog, website and/or our website, etc.

This month we celebrate all those who have been a part of The Love Alliance, past and present. We celebrate and thank Owen and others like him; our Group Leaders past and present; Marjie and all the kids at No Limits Academy. Those who helped us get our start, Craig Gross; The Ranzino, Buckingham and Frenke families; and our board members, Curt and Jesse. Our tour family, Candice, Brian, Hade, Matt, Chris, Bryan Kemper, Eric Samuel Timm, Emma and others. All of our generous donors, supporters and volunteers. The list could go on. Your support has impacted more lives than you know.

Lets celebrate these unsung heroes together this month.