Is your missions trip cancelled? Cancelling (or even rescheduling) your short-term trip may not be the only option.
It’s worth considering if there are other options like repurposing the trip into something local (actually, this post works regardless of if you also cancel or reschedule the trip). It all comes down to the original purpose of the trip and working to extrapolate from that trip its purpose.
Let’s take for example a Youth Trip or Vacation Bible School (VBS) trip in Poland. The heart behind the trip is to engage high school students in a VBS program and have them engage well with younger kids and help make the program a success.
Now let’s see where we might be able to take that same group of high school students and engage them now or in months to come in a similar purpose.
You could have those high school students working to creatively build things for local kids to do while they are in a quarantine.
You could have those high school students reaching out to family with young kids to see if they have any needs during this time.
You could have those high school students sign up for a local VBS-type program this summer
You could have those high school students reach out to local teachers to ask what they are doing to help parents and see if they could help.
It’s really quite simple if you stop to think back about the original purpose and goal for the trip and then mine out a means to do that locally. Truth is, many people are quite bored and your creative ideas here could both help engage your participants and help a lot of people in your local community.
This is one post of many we're doing related to the current crisis. Download Cancelled: A Guide to Maintaining Missions Engagement When Your Short-Term Trip is Cancelled.
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