If you haven’t picked up your Fathers Day gift yet, we can help. Potential gifts for your dad include: Autographed Tony Dungy books Autographed copies of The Shack by Paul Young Nooma Videos Autographed copies of The Long Fall Back to Earth by Jars of Clay Autographed Max Lucado books Autographed Randy Alcorn books Autographed Joshua Harris books Autographed Brian Homell books (Chaplain for the Arizona Diamondbacks) LET US SHIP YOUR DAD HIS FATHERS DAY GIFT TODAY! Thanks for thinking of your dad, and for providing a mentor for a young man growing up without a father! Tell your friends about the campaign! Here’s the link: http://www.thementoringproject.org/fathers-day-campaign.html
21May, 2009
Before you go buying that Bar-be-Cue accessory kit from Wal Mart, know that The Mentoring Project is working on a gift/donation campaign for this coming Fathers Day. We’ve already got many authors and musicians who are donating autographed books and CD’s as we are creating a catalog of stuff you can ship directly to your dad. And for every gift, I am going to write a personal thank you card to your dad, thanking him for being in your life. No kidding. What a blessing he is to you for sticking around. So, if you would like to get your father an autographed copy of Coach Tony Dungy’s new book Uncommon, or one of Randy Alcorn’s great novels, signed by the author himself, sign up on my e-mail list to the right and we will blast you an e-mail in about a week letting you know how. Comedian Nick Thune is actually donating his father! His real father (he says he calls too much, and wants to give him to a kid who doesn’t have a father. Very kind of Nick.) I will also be posting the items again on this blog to let you know, so keep a look [...]
21Apr, 2009
For a couple years now Nick Thune and I have had a few mutual friends, and we finally ran into each other in LA last week. I found Nick to be seriously funny. We talked a bit about comedy and he shared some great stories from his career, including his first appearance on the Tonight show, in which an AIDS awareness commercial aired right before he came on. I’ve thought for a long time performing comedy is one of the hardest things you can do, and even harder to do well. And yet Nick makes it look easy. Turns out he is in Portland this weekend for The Bridgetown Comedy Festival, including a show at The Baghdad theater on Friday night. I’ll be catching the Saturday show at Mt. Tabor because I’ll have come into town that day, otherwise I’d be at all three of his shows. All that to say, check out Nick Thune if he comes to your town.
14Apr, 2009
As I’ve mentioned, this week we launched the new Mentoring Project website at www.thementoringproject.org. Thanks to all of you who have visited the site and told your friends about it. We are recruiting ten-thousand mentors through one-thousand church based programs. We already have eighty mentors, seven churches and over 300 people are giving small monthly donations to keep us going. Our vision is huge, and we are supported by a grass roots campaign of people just like you. If you give a monthly donation, or are planning on giving, would you mind clicking on your photo-booth or webcam application and uploading a video to you-tube to tell us why you give? I will then feature it on this blog and on our donation site itself. We hear such beautiful stories about why this issue is important to people, and we want the world to hear those stories directly from you guys. Make sure to lead the video with your name and location (if you are comfortable) and then tell us why providing mentors for fatherless kids is important to you. You can let me know about your video through the comment option here on this blog entry, and I [...]
08Apr, 2009
My roomate, Justin, teaches at a school in a rough neighborhood here in Portland, and it happens to be a school that partners with The Mentoring Project, a mentoring program I started a couple years ago. We are now mentoring 65 kids and are rapidly expanding our reach. We provide mentors to kids through church-based programs and believe strongly the church holds a big chunk of the solution to the fatherlessness crisis in America. One of the many ways I get feedback about our program is through Justin. He actually sees our mentors showing up at his school to spend time with their kids. A story he told me last night took me back thirty years to similar memories from my own life. One of the kids at Justin’s school has a dad who has been issued a restraining order. Our mentors name is Ross Hallbach and for the sake of privacy I’ll refer to his mentee as David. Ross was recruited through a church’s partnership with TMP, and then trained by our staff. Ross has been mentoring David for about six months and shows up for an after school program once each week (though they spend time together outside [...]
