Dear friends and family,With gratitude in our hearts, we want to thank you for all your support over the last year. Your regular investments helped 160 sponsor children go to school in 2022 (including 50 new sponsor children added over the last year!). Your donations provided scholarships for 10 university students. Your support also helped us relaunch our preschool program for another 30 children and revamp our after-school program (aka "Dream Center") for 40 children and youth. Together, we mentored and tutored hundreds of students and fed thousands of mouths at our drop-in center in Manila.To close out 2022, you gave generously for 100 children to attend a Christmas party (aside from our separate parties for 30 preschool students and 40 youth volunteers), you provided Christmas gifts for 160 children and youth, and you provided Christmas groceries for 122 families!Thank you for making 2022 the "Year of the Comeback" at IT Tender. With so many programs and events throughout the year, nothing is as epic and anticipated as our big Christmas party for the children. Click here or click below to enjoy this video from the party! (*click "CC" in the video for English subtitles)...

In 2023, we're looking forward to more opportunities to give back, to empower, and to serve. We pray that we can send another 50 (or more) new children to school through child sponsorship at IT Tender. Anna (wearing white in the photos below) is one of the new sponsor children added to our program in 2022. We are hopeful and excited to find sponsors to invest in her siblings and in other children in their slum community to be able to go to school as well (for just $1/day or $30/month per child).

John & Jam Coffey are also looking forward to finally visiting Canada from June-July 2023 to share updates with our Canadian supporters and friends. It's been more than three years since their last visit to Canada, as the pandemic caused significant delays in the processing of Jam's new visitor visa and Jenny's Canadian citizenship application (to become a dual-citizen like her big sister Ali).Although we would love to visit all of our friends and supporters, and we wish you could visit our programs here in person, the next best thing is for you to witness this new video that gives an inside look into our drop-in center, our new-look preschool, and the newest community we are serving (where many of the homes are built on bamboo stilts over a bay).Click here or click below to step into our world at IT Tender...

Even though we've been doing this transformative work with families in the slums for decades, we still find ourselves in shock by the magnitude and depth of poverty in Manila as we enter new communities and introduce our programs to those families.We regularly visit our students in their homes to check in on their well-being and demonstrate our care, encouragement, and concern for each of them. Sometimes, sponsors and donors (especially our Filipino donors) are able to visit their very own sponsor children in person. Seeing their daily lives and ongoing struggles at home is a reminder of what we are working towards. We seek to end the cycle of generational poverty for their families. And we've seen numerous families leave these slum communities and find stable jobs and safer homes upon completing school through our scholarships and programs. These are some of the homes of our current students. They are simple, but loving places. There is pain and strain, but also genuine hope.

Thank you for all your compassionate support for these communities! Below are the current prayers and praises of our team in Manila.

- The Tender Team

• Our very own staff member and head of our youth programs Pastor Gabriel "Gabby" Malquisto has been invited to a leadership summit in the US called "Leader Mundial" (from March 27 to April 1, 2023); pray that US immigration will approve of his request for a visitor visa to attend the summit
• There are 6 children in the community on a waiting list in need of a sponsor for their schooling (it costs just $1/day or $30/month to sponsor a child at IT Tender); contact John Coffey by email at johndlcoffey@gmail.com for information on how you could help one or more of these children go to school; we are also interviewing several new families to add more children to our waiting list of potential sponsor children (praying to add at least 50 more sponsor children in 2023)

• Jam Coffey was finally granted a new visa to visit Canada again with the Coffey family! (they look forward to sharing updates with our Canadian supporters and friends in Ontario from June-July 2023)
• Our recent application for a new accreditation for our preschool with the local government was approved! (hopefully this opens more doors to establish a stronger connection and partnership with the local government)

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