Our Northeast Valley Consortium chose foster children as the focus of service projects for “God’s work. Our hands.” Sunday, 9/11/2022. In this post, the consortium shares photos and the story of their work for the non-profit Arizona Helping Hands.

Together we packed 440 personal hygiene kits for Arizona Helping Hands. All five churches — New Journey Lutheran (Fountain Hills), Christ the Lord Lutheran (Carefree), Living Water Lutheran (Scottsdale), New Covenant Lutheran (Scottsdale), and Ascension Lutheran (Paradise Valley) — collaborated to support Arizona’s leading provider of necessities to young children, teens, and infants who are making transitions to foster care or among foster care placements. Arizona Helping Hands distributes approximately 4,000 kits annually, a supply bolstered by the collaboration of the Consortium, who even added a handwritten note of love and good wishes to each recipient foster child’s kit.

This was a blessed opportunity to celebrate our identity as “one church, freed in Christ to serve and love our neighbor” with “every act of service, in every daily calling, in every corner of life – flow[ing] freely from a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.”

According to recent reporting by KJZZ.org, approximately 12,000 Arizona children are in foster care, a number that has dropped from 19,000 in 2016 through concerted support to families from the Department of Child Safety. Still, the Annie E. Casey Foundation ranks Arizona 40th in terms of national child well-being. KJZZ.org noted that 1800 foster children were looking for homes as the 2022 school year began.