For nearly 30 years World Hope International has been guided by a never-failing principle: “With God, all things are possible.” And just like World Hope International (WHI) did in 1996 when it became operational, we prepare to enter 2026 by asking for something that only He can deliver.

That’s why Founder Jo Anne Lyon and President & CEO Jenn Petersen have been pulling out all the stops in launching a campaign to raise $8.5 million by the end of the year. A bold goal to be sure. It will take bold prayers, a few leaps of faith and committed partners to complete projects already under way in Liberia, Haiti, Cambodia, Sierra Leone and the Philippines, and to ensure World Hope’s mission continues for the foreseeable future.

“These days we have a scarcity mindset that rejects what God wants to do,” says Jo Anne. And what does he want to do? “More than we can ask, think or imagine,” she says. This is something Jo Anne knows from experience. After wrestling with a desire to launch World Hope for 11 years─and one day after her last paycheck came from a previous job─Jo Anne started World Hope with nothing but a desire to help vulnerable people, and a plan on paper of how to build an organization to do that. It was a lunch meeting with a potential donor that Jo Anne presented her plan, and by the time the waitress brought the check, Jo Anne had been promised by this one, generous donor to fund the entire start-up costs of the first year. World Hope was born on a handshake and a promise that has led to hundreds of thousands of families helped, lives saved, and dozens of communities infused with hope.

To talk about where we have been and where we need to go, Jo Anne and Jenn sat down for a 55-minute conversation in which we learn how God has guided both of them over the years, shaping them through the fullness of time, to be ready for the task He has for them today.

The task may be large and the workers few, but the mission remains the same─to bring hope to the hardest places and let people who feel forgotten know that God sees them, and World Hope does too. We are still here, fighting for them.

Jo Anne remembers a time during the war in Sierra Leone when she slogged her way through sandy ground during the dry season to reach a small refugee camp where she heard voices from afar singing “What a Mighty God We Serve.” An 80-year-old woman, at one of the worst camps Jo Anne had ever seen, ran up and thanked her for coming, saying, “We thought we had been forgotten!” Sometimes just being there is more important than delivering rice, or medicines, or clean water or shelter. “The ministry of presence is an entire ministry itself,” says Jo Anne.

She recalls another time, in Cambodia, in 1996 when the term “human trafficking” had not even been coined yet, that a leader in a village, who struggled to explain what was happening there, took her to see for herself. At 10:30 in the morning, she drove down a dusty road lined with metal buildings and white plastic chairs. There were hundreds of chairs outside with children sitting them. Children who were for sale. There were 15,000 children in this encampment where there had once been only 3,000. “There were four of us. We were three old ladies and one tired missionary. We stood on that corner and held hands and prayed in the face of evil and asked, what do you want us to do Lord?”

One thing World Hope knows without a doubt is that it takes boldness in the face of evil to change the world, and God honors bold prayers. When it comes to defending the defenseless, we cannot walk that road alone. We must partner with churches, and individual donors, and other non-profit entities to have an impact.

In their sit-down video, Jo Anne and Jenn both talk about how it isn’t just those in Liberia and Sierra Leone who are blessed with the clean water from wells we help to dig, or the young girls in the Philippines who are cared for after being exploited, when God works miracles, he blesses the giver as well. What World Hope does best is to connect those with means and opportunity with those who don’t have either of those. Says Jenn: “That’s what I want to call the church to today, to say ‘you get to, you have to, be part of this miracle because God works through his people in these beautiful, miraculous ways.’”

As World Hope finds itself less than two months from the end of the year and its critical fund-raising goals looming, and as we near the Christmas season, Jo Anne recalls that in December of 1995, as she was reading the Christmas story about how the angel came to Mary and told her she would bear a son. Mary, not knowing how or why, said “I am here, use me.” And the angel Gabriel told Mary that with God, nothing is impossible. “That became the tagline of my spirit,” says Jo Anne.

As World Hope sets a bold vision of what hopefully will be another 30 years of serving in Christ-likeness, feeding, caring for and protecting thousands upon thousands of his children, the World Hope team knows that God has already put the wheels in motion. Just like when, with a little trepidation, but little hesitation, that World Hope accepted the task of finishing a water project in Liberia that will benefit 50,000, but which has added $450,000 in costs not already in the 2025 budget. Ironically, this was a project that World Hope initially bid on, and lost, to another international non-profit that lost most of its funding when USAID was closed. Jenn sees this water project as an opportunity to honor God with yet another bold prayer. “We get to be an answer to prayer and be part of this miracle.”

Part of that prayer is that God will allow World Hope to continue to be present in people’s lives, and to bring hope to the hardest of places. It wants to let people know they have not been forgotten in this world. It is not a savior complex, says Jenn, but an opportunity, through humility, to honor God by bringing transformational change.