Jump For Joel

We stopped in at Rochester (IL) Junior High on Friday to pick up a donation from their Student Council. The students raised $2100 for Jump for Joel, all of which will be used to build a new kitchen building at the Gathiga Children’s Hope Home in Kenya. Here’s some footage of before & after the visit. And yes, we really are this dorky.

After a visit by our lovely Amelia the Rochester Junior High Student Council decided they wanted to help out. They planned a spirit week and visited classrooms each morning for a week collecting money for J4J. They were so excited not only to collect and give us the donation but to hear that it will be going to work just as soon as they gave it to us!

Check back soon for progress on our kitchen project and other updates from Shana as she spends the next two weeks at Gathiga.

Hello all!  I’m back in Kenya, though only for 2 weeks. Here’s a little video taken at Gathiga Children’s Hope Home to say hello! Enjoy!

This past Friday The Simple Dollar announced Jump for Joel as the official Christmas charity for 2008!! Check out the article here.  This may or may not have been linked to the fact that the author, Trent Hamm, is my (favorite) brother-in-law.  The Simple Dollar is a blog all about personal finance.  This gives Trent’s thousands of readers a chance to be introduced to some cool kids in Kenya.  God works in weird ways… sometimes he uses blogs and brothers-in-law.

As a thank you to Trent I would now like to return the favor.

I, Vicky Knoke, would like to announce thesimpledollar.com as my favorite personal finance blog for 2008!!!

Now the thousands (ish) readers of the J4J blog can be linked with some financial advice.

Thanks again to Trent and all of the readers of The Simple Dollar!!!

Brittany is a Junior here at UIS and is really excited to be apart of the Jump Crew. She hasn’t been to Kenya yet but has plans to make that happen this summer. We’re completely stoked to have her on board!

Get to know her a little better here:

TokBox – Free video chat and video messaging

We are so excited to have our first-ever intern!!!  I’ll be honest, it’s a little strange for us to use the word intern, as it implies a hierarchy of paid staff…which we don’t have!  So in a way, Amelia & I are also interns, and yet directors?… Hmm…go, grassroots organization, go!  :)

We asked our lovely intern, Amanda, to make a little introduction video for our supporters. So here you go!

Meet Amanda:

TokBox – Free Video Chat and Video Messaging

As you can see, we’re making some major changes to jumpforjoel.org!! It’s a long process, so stick with us.

Thanks for your patience!