CURE International is an organization I started following late last year. I was researching different ministries and organizations in November to consider giving a donation to for Christmas, and I ran across a story about them helping cure children with club foot. The message I read in the article was simple, yet profound. “Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you can walk.”
That message stuck with me over the next couple of weeks. The time came around Thanksgiving and we decided to donate to a ministry as something that we would do this Christmas. Our intention and focus just to give differently this year and change the focus of our giving. I remembered the article I read on CURE’s website and showed it to my wife. Without a doubt we both new that this was the ministry we needed to support. So we donated, our money, and didn’t hear anything else back, until about 2 weeks later.
I was checking emails when I saw one from CURE. When I clicked on it, this is what I saw.
“Dear Whitt
As you read this Cathereen has been wheeled into the operating room and CURE doctors are praying over Cathereen as they begin surgery. We wanted you to know so that you can also be praying and thinking of Cathereen during this time. Later, you will receive updates about how surgery went and how Cathereen is recovering.
Thank you again for making this surgery possible for Cathereen,
CURE International”
We had a name! Not only did CURE give us a name, but we actually had time to pray for her before surgery! I spent the rest of my time that morning researching CURE’s website CURE.org and that is where I found the CURE Kids page and Cathereen. I’ve never known of any organization that allows you to follow the kids that you support for life changing surgeries, and not only gives you updates on the kids, but gives you time to pray for them before surgery.
Being the Domino means being willing to be used by God for His purposes to touch the lives of others.
CURE International is our “Domino” for the month of February.
Interview with Joel Glovier
website and graphic designer – CURE International
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Tell us a little bit about CURE International and how it got started?
CURE is a nonprofit organization whose primary mission is to heal children with curable disabilities in the world’s poorest countries, and share with them the love of Jesus. We own and operate hospital facilities in 10 nations around the world, as well as clubfoot clinics in a handful of others.
The organization was founded in 1996 by a couple who had a background in medicine (read accomplished surgeon and his wife, a nurse) and had a heart that was touched by God for the world’s poorest children with disabilities. Two years later our first hospital opened in Kijabe, Kenya, and we have been opening hospitals almost yearly ever since.
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What made you decide to get involved?
It was simply a door that opened and God led me to it. I was a freelance graphic/web designer for a couple years before coming to CURE, in business for myself. When we became pregnant with out first child I decided to look for a full-time position rather than living the freelance life. A friend at my church had been on their website and noticed the opening, so I applied.
It’s truly been a blessing and a privilege to be part of CURE. I get to do the work that I excel at, and in a venue that is directly related to living for Jesus – which is not the case for the vast majority of the colleagues in my industry.
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What is one of the most challenging things you face at CURE?
Probably just the intense challenges of trying to spread the word about what CURE is doing – all while doing it on the limited budget and time-frame of a nonprofit, but while still trying to do it with excellence. That aspect can become very challenging, but also very motivating. Often pressure breeds some of the best creativity. And sometimes not so much.
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Tell us about some of the different programs offered by CURE
Hospitals & Mobile Clinics
Well the primary way we accomplish our mission is just by running hospitals that see patients on a regular basis. One of the ways we find those patients, though, is through what we call mobile clinics. Since a lot of our patients come from rural villages far from the cities our hospitals are in, we have to conduct what we call a “mobile clinic” to identify patients we can help.
Mobile clinics occur monthly at many of our hospitals. The primary medical and administrative staff all get on a bus for one or two days and literally just drive out into some of the remote areas around their country outside of the main city where the hospital is located. They will spread the word via networks of pastors to the villages about when and where the clinic will be, and tell them to tell their people, “If you have a child with a disability, people from CURE are coming to look at your child so we can find out if it can be possible to cure your child.”
It’s amazing how word travels. People will come from all over to meet the mobile clinic staff, and that’s where the doctors examine patients (often times treating minor issues on the spot) and schedule patients who can be healed with surgery for dates to come to the hospital.
That is one of the primary ways we identify children and families who we can help at our hospitals. Many patients also simply walk in our front doors.
CURE Clubfoot Worldwide (CCW)
At each of our hospitals, and in several countries in addition to, we treat children around the world born with severe clubfoot. The CURE Clubfoot Worldwide (CCW) program is really set up to eliminate infant clubfoot in the world. That’s their mission. A great guy named Andy oversees the program, and he’s got a staff in these countries who focus on treating non-surgical clubfoot treatment.
The story with non-surgical clubfoot treatment is that if detected while still an infant, clubfoot can be cured with a simple series of casts over 6 weeks while the child’s bones are still soft and pliable. It’s called the Ponseti Method.
So CCW is focused on treating infants with the Ponseti Method with the goal of eliminating clubfoot in the world. Sadly there are still plenty of individuals with clubfoot who – because they are older – will require surgery to repair. But those children we treat in our hospitals as well.
Fund-raising
I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the programs that we have initiated as a communication/fund-raising effort for the organization. These programs are geared toward spreading the word about the need that children with disabilities in the developing world have for care, sharing what CURE is doing to help, and urging people to get involved. Some of our current projects are:
Dance 4 Kids Who Can’t (D4K)
D4K is a fund raising/awareness initiative where high school and middle school students organize and run a school dance to raise money to fund the surgery of a child in one of our hospitals. For more information on D4K go to: cure.org/d4k
CUREkids
One of our most recent online additions is something called CUREkids, a part of our website where visitors can meet and get to know actual patients going through the treatment process at a CURE hospital. It’s something we built from scratch and has a long way to go, but already you can do some pretty cool stuff there using your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
CURE Prayer Tree
Something that I’m going to share with you that we haven’t even finished yet is called the “Prayer Tree”, and it’s going to be a piece on our website – actually not really fund-raising oriented, but more spiritual ministry based – where our supporters can commit to praying for individual prayer requests that we have as an organization, or in specific hospitals. It’s still a little ways off from being launched, but you can go to cure.org/help-now/pray and sign up to be notified when it’s ready.
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Can you give us some more information about Cure’s hospitals and where they are located?
Generally speaking, our hospitals are in the world’s poorest nations serving the children, families and communities that cannot afford treatment for their disability. The focus from the start of CURE was to treat curable conditions in children as a vehicle to share the love of Jesus Christ around the world.
Not all of our hospitals, however, are in the world’s poorest areas. We have one hospital, the Oasis Hospital in Al Ain, UAE, that serves among some of the world’s wealthiest. That particular facility was formerly run by another Christian group for almost 50 years, but was donated and requested that CURE takeover the hospital by the government of the UAE. So we view our role there the same way – to be a reflection of Jesus Christ through medical care – but in that particular location we serve among those who are not the world’s poorest.
We actually have a total of 11 hospitals in 10 countries, with two more in the works right now (but still unannounced). The hospitals are in:
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Which of your hospitals are in the greatest need?
The greatest ongoing support need for each of our hospitals is the ongoing operating costs to provide surgery and care for children. None of our hospitals truly have an excess of support and in fact would be able to expand care to reach more children if only we had additional financial resources. Supporters can directly help any of our hospitals – and it will immediately meet the needs for kids waiting in line for care.
Also, typically the newer the hospitals (Niger, etc) the more “needy” they are as they seek to build a donor base that cares specifically about their work.
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CUREkids is something that truly touched my life. What gave you the idea to provide all of the interaction and updates?
Well a lot of this was born before I came to CURE. I’ve been with the organization for almost a year and a half now, but before I arrived, Lisa (our former department head) and Joel Worrall (our current department head) and a few others had really recognized the need for such a program. Joel W provided the technology expertise (a software engineer by background) to say, “Hey, with current web technologies and social media we can do this.”
A lot of the concept for the program isn’t completely unique in that it’s just what people are doing with the web these days. But some of what makes it unique for us is that not a lot of people are doing quite what we are doing with it, and almost nobody is doing something quite like CUREkids in the nonprofit sphere.
So in that sense it’s been a very exciting project to be part of, but also a very difficult one. There’s a lot of refining still left, and probably the bulk of our work on the project is still ahead of us.
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Tell us about your experience at the Passion 2011 Conference
Passion was amazing. First of all let me just say it was really dope just to be able to travel down to Atlanta and be in the convention center with 22,000 young people who are excited about Jesus. We met and talked to hundreds of students who are genuinely seeking God’s presence in their lives, and looking for ways to be moved to action by the Gospel. So that alone was just really awesome.
But personally for me, two things were notable.
First, I was just so struck at the generosity of the students. Passion had set a goal for us to try and raise $50K, which in essence would fund 50 surgeries. But the students gave way above and beyond – for a grand total of $141K just to CURE! All in all – among the ten organizations at Passion – the student’s gave 1.1 million dollars, which was more than twice what Passion had hoped to raise for the organizations. So just the generosity of the students, a group of people who are not exactly known for their vast amounts of disposable wealth, that was truly a testimony to me of how God was moving in their lives.
But secondly, the thing that was really notable was just how refreshing it was for me to be able to get out and simply focus on telling the mission and work of CURE to people personally. I work most of my days almost all day behind a computer screen, writing code and using graphics software. But a long time ago before I got into this career path I worked a lot in student ministry, and so it’s always really energizing to me to get out, talk to and meet with people in real settings. It was just really refreshing.
Also, the people who plan and put on Passion are amazing, too. Sadly, the Christian industry for charity work is not as selfless as you would hope, and far too often big organizations are promoted to the great profit of many musicians, speakers or bands, and it equates in reality to donor dollars being far less effective than what is perceived. So the fact that the Passion people put all this on and do an amazing amount of work in preparation and don’t charge CURE a dime to be there, but just ask us to come and tell our story to the students is really an amazing gift. We are so thankful to have been part of Passion the past few years.
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What are some ways others can help?
Well there are several ways. We even have a nice little section at our website that I’ll point you to: cure.org/help-now. But here’s a few highlights too…
Pray for CURE
We are always in need of the prayer support of Believers. CURE is all about a “50/50″ ministry – meaning that we believe medical healing is only part of the equation, the spiritual healing is just as much what we are called to do as the medical work. There are so many ways people can pray, so I would suggest visiting this page, which is where you can sign up to receive a monthly email with prayer requests for CURE.
Get involved with CUREkids
The beauty about the CUREkids program, is that it was designed to be a “social sponsorship program”, and have a viral effect. So, the more people that get involved, the more people we get to meet since it’s integrated with your Facebook wall, and you can share the children you follow with your Twitter followers and on Facebook.
So it really helps us do what we are doing just when people follow a child’s story. We want to raise money, but we really believe that if people just take time to meet these kids, read about their stories, and share them with others, the giving will occur as people are moved by the stories of the children themselves. So head on over to CUREkids and start following and sharing some kids!
Join the Street-Team
The Street-Team is like our “viral guerrillas”. This is a team of web-savvy CURE supporters who are interesting in helping us spread the word about these children, and what we are doing to help them. Mainly they commit to receive daily emails with short action items they can do to help CURE, mostly of a social-media nature, like re-tweeting our Twitter content, or commenting on our blog posts.
The cool thing is that it’s just a really simple and low cost way that anyone can help CURE, and the children we treat.
Tell Someone
One of the easiest things you can do is just tell someone. Tell a friend, family member, fellow student or coworker – just talk to people and say, “Hey, did you know that kids with disabilities in the developing world face some really amazing hardships just because they are disabled? And did you know there is an organization doing something to help them?”
Then just tell them about CURE, and why it means something to you. Believe it or not, that goes a long way. Sometimes a conversation like that will result in some really amazing things.
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Tell us about the Street Team
The street team is a way to get the new generation of philanthropists involved with giving to the organization. As people begin to develop social networks and can influence their peers and contacts…influence is starting to trump affluence.
Don’t get me wrong. CURE needs financial donations to operate. We can’t continue with the work without the support of donors and giving. But influence is becoming more and more available to the common person. It used to be that one had to own or control a newspaper or TV station to influence mass amounts of people. Now all it takes is a free account on a social network and a willingness to share.
So the CURE Street Team is a tool to keep our social media advocates in the loop on ways they can help us get the word out and influence others to get involved with CURE’s mission.
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Have you personally been to any of the CURE hospital facilities?
No. I have not yet had the chance to visit any of our hospitals, not for lack of desire, but for lack of need and time in our schedule. We get very focused on our projects as a communications department, and so seldom is there a chance for people to travel without a strategic purpose for them to do so. My department VP would love to send me the next chance he gets, but it’s tough to do when I have pressing responsibilities in the home office to tend to.
That being said I know it’s in the plans to visit a hospital soon. I think if he had his way, Joel W would send everybody in our department at least once to a hospital. When I do get a chance to go it will likely be our hospital in the Dominican Republic because it’s the nearest one, and the least costly to travel to.
I have, however, been to Kenya three times before becoming part of CURE. In fact, my very close friend’s mom was born in Kijabe, right across the street from our CURE Kenya facility. In fact about 15 years ago, before CURE was even started, I visited Kijabe when I was first in Kenya. So I have some exposure to the experience of life in a developing country, and very much have a heart for Kenya. Needless to say I’d jump at the chance to visit our hospital there.
Joel, thank you so much for the interview, and for sharing with us your heart about CURE.
Please take time to visit CURE.org and see for yourself what God is doing through this organization.
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