Our History



The Sponsor Children's project started with relationships with the community of LaPalmilla Mexico in the state of Veracruz. Jennifer Andrade first visited the village on a mission team with her church from Virginia Beach. Her 4 years of French in High School were useless, but the language barrier didn’t hinder the lifelong relationships being formed and a deep passion to return and serve the community in any way possible. She returned for years on multiple mission trips and then traveled there for personal vacations. On each visit, she would bring a large navy duffel bag filled with clothes, books, and toys for the kids. She was like Santa Claus, known as “La Jeni” or “The Jen”. Her dream was to build her own house in the village and restart taking mission teams down to help finish the sanctuary she helped start in 1999. So in 2011, She started taking mission teams down from Pitman UMC, completing the church in 2017.​



All of these years in the village Jennifer has learned about the intricacies of the culture. As a teacher, it broke her heart to hear elementary and middle school kids talk about discontinuing their education. In 2011 while talking with parents about this, the normal response was that the cost of school and school supplies was high and needed at a time with low income in the harvest calendar for crops. They also argued that school was unnecessary for the boys to work on the ranches and for the girls to be stay-at-home moms. Jennifer offered a few families financial support to ensure their kids continued their education, which worked!​​



The next year she realized there were more in need of this aid but could not afford it personally, so she told a few friends about the need and they happily provided the finances needed. Year by year it grew and within a few years over 100 kids were being sponsored to continue their education. All these years later we have had over a thousand kids continue their education, and most recently, we had our 1st student who had the same sponsor from kindergarten through High School. The Sunday School attendance has increased to the point where the church has continued repurposing old rooms or building new rooms to hold them. The local congregation credits this to our efforts of connecting the kids to the church. Utilizing data from the 2010 and 2020 Mexico Census, we've seen remarkable improvements: our literacy rate has increased eight times the national average, and average grade completion has risen by two grades.