World Vision International

As vice president of client strategy and growth at Apex Media Partners, Van helps organizations navigate change with clarity and confidence.

He's worked with CBN, World Vision, St. Jude, Operation Smile, Feed the Children, and other organizations and ministries.

So, Van, thanks for joining us on Point of View today.

Thank you, Rudy.

And like you said, there's no consciousness or moral judgment there.

And I'd love to get your take on this too.

Just, I mean, when you are working with a lot of the ministries that you work with, like, you know, World Vision or St. Jude or Feed the Children, like these are very human ministries addressing human needs.

And I know just as someone who's been in the nonprofit world for a long time myself, that when you are addressing these needs and you are partnering with people who are donating and supporting your ministry, it's like the human connection and touch there between your partners and the work that you're doing is so important.

right and so one of the great things about america and a free market economy entrepreneurialism and yes wealth building is with resources you can launch missions and initiatives and ew my wife and i she as a medical missionary nurse me as a preacher we've traveled all over this world and when i go in the interior of developing nations And I find like a hospital or a school or a well, fresh water can revolutionize a third world country.

Guess who built it? Samaritan's Purse, Compassion International, World Help, World Vision, Baptist Men on Mission.

Why is it always when I go into these developing nations or my wife and we're giving away medical devices and we're giving away, yes, Bibles and we're giving away tons and tons of food.

We took half a million bottles of water to Lima, Peru just a few years ago.

And look at how the American government under the Democrats signed up for that agenda of anti-Israel, anti-Zionism, Zionism is racism, and funding the Palestinian Intifada through the Agency for International Development we now know.

It wasn't just Christian groups like World Vision, but it was a bunch of other American agencies that were deployed to fight against Israel in the culture war.

It's

unbelievable.

And out of the communities, I looked at, were there other NGOs there? So we started trying to place the children with other NGOs.

Like we saw Compassion and World Vision in a lot of areas.

And we would go to them and say, could you take these children and put them under your program? And so...

One of the communities that we never saw other NGOs was Choco and they didn't have other NGOs.

And then in terms of Africa, look, I have to remind myself of the perception I had in my head before I went and spent time on the continent.

And the vision in my head was World Vision Ads.

I grew up as a kid seeing World Vision ads on the TV and World Vision had a goal to raise money.

They needed to raise money through donations.

Now, you don't raise money through donations by showing the harbor in Cape Town.

It's a drive to ensure that you're achieving exactly what you need to.

And I think it's because we begin in a slight deficit, if you will, because as you said, the perception is, okay, Africa is broken.

There's like all the world vision stuff.

They will just say, there's not a lot of economic opportunity in my country, or there's a lot of gang violence.

And so you had groups like World Relief, World Vision, obviously Catholic Charities and others playing such a huge role in how that created this mechanism.

But it's been interesting for me to see the very demographic that is a very compassionate demographic of these evangelical Christians who roughly 25% of the electorate who typically are very sensitive and say, gosh, we hate these stories.

They make us feel bad.