Sweet Hope was started in 2011 and is a non-profit business located in Lakewood, Colorado.  It is owned by me and my husband.  Sweet Hope was founded after we took a mission trip with our two daughters (13 and 9 at the time) and my mom to the Dominican Republic.  This wasn’t your ordinary mission trip.  It was a vision mission trip.  Our duty was not to “do” per se, but to see the vision and hope for a better life for the people in the Dominican.  We saw the worst poverty stricken areas, where people were living in disease ridden water with children wearing little to no clothing.  We saw little girls – not much older than our oldest daughter at the time with babies of their own.  We saw mothers with multiple children trying to make a better life for themselves by making coal, selling lingerie, opening a store to sell candy or liquor to the residents in their barrios and bateys.  We saw US missionaries working alongside the locals to help them work themselves out of poverty.  We saw real life pain and suffering.  This motivated us to do something about it.  When we returned from our week long stay in the Dominican, we decided that we were going to make a difference.  Even if we didn’t think we could change the world, changing one person’s world would be enough for us.

 

Without the additional resources or time to do anything, we prayed and prayed that God could lead us to the answers for how to help those that are less fortunate than us.  See, in America, we have all of the riches in the world.  Now, I’m not talking riches as in money…I’m talking about real riches.  We have water we can drink from a faucet, we can shower daily, we have food in our stomachs and more often than not, we don’t go to bed hungry.  We tend to throw away food that someone else could and would eat if given the opportunity.  Some people of the Dominican Republic only eat one time a day, if that.  And, the food of choice (not) is rice.  They have beans if they are lucky.  And, the Dominicans with money are lucky; they eat meat a couple of times a week with their rice.

 

Our leader on our mission trip said an extremely profound statement to us as we arrived in the Dominican.  He said, “We aren’t better than the people of the Dominican Republic!  The only difference between them and us is that we won the birth lottery.”  This statement, as simple as it is, hit home for me.  As an infant, I was born in Vietnam, during the end of the war.  I didn’t win the birth lottery.  I won much more than that.  I won the adoption lottery!  The chances of winning that lottery were slimmer because I had lost the birth lottery.  But, thanks to my Mom, I am one of the luckiest women on earth.

 

So, it was with great pleasure that our prayers were answered.  God instructed us to create Sweet Hope, a non-profit organization that in it's infancy, we determined that we would bring aide to the impoverished people of Gualey and potentially others around the world by supporting their local churches and other charitable organizations.  In order to help fund this call, Sweet Hope will have fundraising activities to get contributions from friends, family, our personal business(es) and any other people or organizations that God leads to us.  

​

Over the next several years, we have broadened our plan and are not only hoping to members of our family have been involved in many areas to help those in our own community as well. 

​

​