This past week (July 20-27) close to 600 students from across Atlantic Canada gathered in Fredericton and Woodstock to learn more about how to join God in that neighborhood and to be inspired to do the same back home.
This week was full of acts of service, lots of laughter, and times of worship. It took a volunteer leadership team of close to 20 amazing humans who met months before TI to dream, plan, pray, and organize all the lovely details which led to making Tidal Impact happening. There are so many amazing stories about Tidal Impact week, however below are some highlights to give just a ‘snapshot’ of the amazing work that God did this week, as well as a request for your ongoing participation in Tidal Impact.
Food drive totals from Tidal Impact!
16, 769 lbs of food was collected plus $1380.45 in cash in the greater Woodstock area.
13,486 lbs of food was collected in the greater Fredericton area plus $710.65 in cash donations.
That’s a total of 30 255 lbs of food. That will feed a meal to 12 606 families!
We made the news! Watch our amazing CBACyf director Renee Embree sharing about a flashmob that occurred downtown Fredericton (10:57).
http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1576669763642/
Rivercross Church and Happy Valley Goose Bay won the ‘community impact’ competition and were given $200 dollars in seed money to start a new ministry initiative in their church and neighborhood. Rivercross students are wanting to look at ways to make their church a leader in their community in creation care, and Happy Valley Goose Bay is making plastic mats for the homeless and then having donations spots at local businesses to collect the plastic bags to make the mats
Students participated in various neighbouring activities such as: helping clean up a local community centre, picking strawberries with residence of an assisted living centre, helped paint individuals homes, serve in local foodbank, dusted shelves at the library, brought order to the chaos of a business warehouse, fixed bikes, & much more!
This past week was truly amazing! Tidal Impact has a long history of being a catalyst for ministry across Atlantic Canada and we believe will continue to play an important role in next generational ministries across our region. We are therefore asking leaders (volunteer, paid staff, etc.) who have attended or did attend Tidal Impact (2015-2019) to consider joining a local focus group. These focus groups will meet once in regional area, in late fall, for a duration of 2-3 hours.
The hope of these focus groups is to collect input from you and your students (will have a list of questions to ask youth before attending) in order to help continue to keep Tidal Impact relevant and meaningful. We will honour the past as we have our eyes on the future.
If you are interested in being in a focus group please complete this 30 second survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NXVBPXX
Finally, a large thank you to everyone who helped organized and volunteered. Many gave up a week of their summer to serve alongside students at Tidal Impact this year. Thank you for loving youth and for your example of rolling up your sleeve and joining God in your Atlantic neighborhood. Thank you to the amazing students who helped lead the way in serving and representing Jesus to many who don’t know him. Below is the Tidal Impact 2019 Recap video. Enjoy!