MICHEALS’ MEMOIRS December 2020 Update
Dear Friends and Family, How things can change in a hurry! Who would have imagined the course of events these past 12 months. What started off to be a normal year, has turned into anything but that and has altered how we do our recruitment work with Wycliffe.
Go Teach
Our biggest challenge is to actually keep up with the pace of change. Fields of service were closed to sending people, then opened up and again some places have closed down. As you can imagine this has brought a lot of uncertainly and with that a hesitation for people to serve long term. What has increased are the number of people wanting to serve short term and that too is a challenging because you need long term missionaries to support people serving short term.
Over the past few months since the pandemic has impacted our world, we saw ahead of time a need to reinvent ourselves with some type of new name that described our need for educators. We have a big task in recruiting for more than 300+ open educator positions in the more than 30+ Missionary Kid (MK) schools we recruit for. Those MK schools are where most of the 1,700 Wycliffe MKs attend while their parents serve with us overseas.
These health challenges continue to also alter where we reach potential recruits. In our last newsletter we told you about a teacher recruitment fair which was held in November. What started off being a meeting with just three college campuses turned into an online only international recruitment fair. One would have thought that would have created a bigger response, but it didn’t. Last year this event was onsite and we had a Wycliffe teacher recruitment table display and we met 70 educators. This year online, we met only 11 educators. One thing we realized once the online teacher recruitment fair started is that with the name “Wycliffe”, we were at the bottom of the list and when the recruitment fair is only visible on a cell phone with 45+ other groups recruiting, that put us in a challenging spot. Also, with only the name “Wycliffe Bible Translators” at the fair to go on, that too did not broadcast our need for educators.
December 2020 - Chuck & Barb Micheals
Wycliffe’s New Go Teach Seal
Just as the recruitment fair was finishing Wycliffe approved our using the “Go Teach” name for recruiting educators. Work is now underway to also have a “Go Teach” website that will allow potential educators to see what educator jobs are open and in what MK schools around the world. Hopefully, next time we do the online teacher recruitment fair in February 2021, we will be able to use the name “Go Teach” and the new website.