For 13 years, people sitting in services at North Point Community Church have been helping us build a village in Eswatini. Some of the homes our children live in, the classrooms where they learn, and part of the energy that keeps our campus running are all due to pieces of that generosity.
This past Sunday, October 4, our Co-Founder and Chief Program Officer, Janine Maxwell, joined Andy Stanley at North Point’s 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. services for a conversation that launched this year’s Be Rich campaign. Janine shared how God had led her and Ian from running a marketing company in Canada to building a home for children in Eswatini. If you found us through that conversation, welcome! If you missed it, you can see the full service, here.
We wanted to take a moment to share how North Point Community Church’s Be Rich campaign has supported and shaped Heart for Africa’s mission, and what it has helped us build at Project Canaan in Eswatini.
What Is Be Rich?
Be Rich is North Point’s annual generosity campaign. It began in 2007 and takes its name from 1 Timothy 6:18, where Paul urges believers to be rich in good deeds and generous with what they have. The church invites its members to give, serve, and love in Jesus’ name, and the money raised goes to local and global nonprofits.
Heart for Africa is incredibly thankful to have been one of those recipients since 2013, through 13 consecutive campaigns. In that time, Be Rich giving has added up to nearly $1.2 million, supporting our mission and work at Project Canaan, our 2,500-acre sustainability project in Eswatini, where more than 460 children now live.
What Be Rich Has Helped Build at Project Canaan
Behind that number is a list of things you could walk through and touch if you visited the campus. We’ve built about 80 buildings at Project Canaan since 2009 and Be Rich has helped provide some of the most important ones including:
Emseni Homes. Each Emseni Home is a family-style home for 40 boys or 40 girls. Children move up as they grow: toddlers move into the first Emseni Homes, and the newest babies move into the toddler home. Be Rich funding has helped build the homes that make that progression possible.
Clean water. Be Rich helped fund a pipeline that brings reliable water to the campus, which serves our homes, our school, and the farm.
School buildings. Our school at Project Canaan (Project Canaan Academy) now serves hundreds of students from preschool through Grade 8, and Be Rich funding helped put up the buildings they learn in. Our first graduating class is expected around 2030.
Solar power. Be Rich helped fund our solar array, which produces 226 kWp of power and covers roughly a quarter of the energy the campus uses. To date it has avoided about 449 metric tons of CO₂, about what 100 gasoline-powered cars emit in a year. Every dollar we don’t spend on electricity goes back into caring for children.
Operations support. Running a village is expensive, and operating support is the kind of giving that’s hardest to find. Be Rich has helped keep the day-to-day work going.
A school bus. Be Rich bought the school bus our students ride to their field trips, tournaments and more.
Kitchen equipment. Feeding hundreds of children three meals a day takes real equipment, and Be Rich helped us outfit our kitchens for it.
Janine said it plainly from the stage on Sunday: “You’ve funded our school. Our kids go on the school bus that you bought to all of their field trips. We have solar power because of you. We have clean water because of you.”
And there is so much more. Thirteen years of giving has touched almost every part of the campus.
More Than Funding: A Relationship That Started Before We Did
The connection goes back to before Heart for Africa was even founded in 2006. Janine was leading a service trip in South Africa that included several people from North Point, and one of them encouraged her and Ian to move to Alpharetta, Georgia, and get connected with the church.
The relationship has never been only financial. Six global(x) teams have traveled to Eswatini to serve alongside us. global(x) is the global service arm of North Point Ministries, and these teams have helped in our spiritual life department and ministered to our staff. Some of our closest friendships have come out of those trips.
If seeing Project Canaan in person is something you’ve considered, our travel page has the details.
Thirteen Years, and Still Building
The children who arrived in our earliest years are teenagers now. They’ve grown up in homes, classrooms, and a community that people in Georgia helped build from a distance, one Be Rich season at a time. In a typical year we welcome about 40 new children, each placed with us through the courts, and we’re building classrooms for our high school right now, with our first high school students starting in January. From the beginning, our work has rested on one belief: every child matters to God. Janine has a phrase for what it looks like here: we love them back to life.
To everyone at North Point who has given, prayed, or traveled with us, we wanted to just say thank you. We don’t take 13 years of generosity for granted, and we believe God has been at work in every one of them.
If you’d like to be part of what comes next, you can support financially below or get in touch with us at info@heartforafrica.org. We’d love to hear from you, and we’d be grateful for your prayers for the children and staff of Project Canaan.