In our first full year as an organization we gave 24 speeches in Iowa, San Francisco, Ohio, San Marcos, Oregon, Fresno, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, Visalia, Washington, DC and Canada! Thanks to some great logistical planning from Jacob Nels, we also did five half-day or full-day seminars in Bakersfield, Michigan, Oregon, and Virginia. All in all we trained approximately 6,500 people!

We also continually train pro-life advocates to be more gracious and persuasive through our blog. I’m extremely proud of the quality of the content we’ve produced this year, especially the work Tim Brahm has done. By the time we wrote this letter, we had 40 original articles on our blog from this year! And the reach is far and wide. 37,718 people visited our blog in the year 2015 to date. Most of these people are from America, although we had a significant number of visits from Russia, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom as well.

By publishing so often on our blog and reprinting many of our articles at LifeNews.com we are impacting the pro-life movement as a whole, not just the people we can train in person. This has always been a part of our strategy at ERI. It’s exponentially multiplying the people we affect, and it’s also helping us to build trust and credibility as original thinkers who provide value to our readers. This will in turn help us to get the online training course we’re producing this spring to far more people than if we had published it right away.

I get emails and comments online virtually every week from people who say they’ve been helped by our work. Here’s just one reflection from a student named Chloe (pictured below) who we trained at the University of Michigan:

After the seminar I felt much more confident about my ability to defend the pro-life belief that I’m so passionate about. The conversations I had at outreach were amazing. As I talked to people I could feel my confidence and my sense of purpose growing. I feel really good about how I was able to be kind and patient, and I think the seminar definitely made that possible.

This year we also developed a clear plan and budget for the online training course we’re producing next year, made two major changes to our training materials, and created an advisory board filled with respected pro-life leaders who are excited about our work and speaking to our strategies.

We’re not stopping there. This next spring will be our busiest yet. Here’s what our schedule looks like already!

• 1/30: I’m speaking at the TeenSpeak Conference in Chicago, IL.
• 2/14: I’m preaching at NorthPark Community Church in Fresno.
• 2/16-2/18: Our staff is filming our training course in Fresno.
• 2/27 – 3/1: Our staff is running a training seminar followed by two days of outreach at Sacramento State University.
• 3/5: Tim is speaking at the Students for Life Leadership Summit in Kansas City, MO.
• 3/5: I am running a seminar for the pro-life clubs at and around Biola University.
• 3/19: I’m speaking at the Students for Life Leadership Summit in Boston, MA.
• 4/8: I’m giving a Torrey Lecture at Biola University in Los Angeles, CA.
• 4/9: Tim is speaking at the Students for Life Leadership Summit in Los Angeles, CA.
• April Date TBD: Our staff is running a training seminar followed by two days of outreach in west Michigan.

If you are excited by how we are training pro-life advocates, or if you’ve found our content to be personally encouraging or helpful to you, would you consider partnering with us through financial support? Our work is made possible by the faithful support of individuals just like you. 

We have a crystal clear strategy for accomplishing our goals next year, and funding is our only significant obstacle. My goal is for us to have raised $86,000 by the end of the year. This would put us in a healthy financial position, as it would be enough to cover all of our costs for the first half of next year, including two campus outreaches in Sacramento and Michigan and filming the online training course. Thanks to some very generous donors, we’ve raised $27,800, or about one-third of our goal since our last newsletter! As you are deciding where to put your end-of-year giving, please consider making a special gift to help us train thousands of pro-life advocates next year.

On behalf of Tim, Jacob, Christina, and Kim, thank you so much for partnering with us. Your prayers and financial support mean the world to us.

Josh Brahm, for the ERI staff

The post A Look Back at 2015, and How We’re Moving Forward appeared first on Equal Rights Institute Blog - Clear Pro-Life Thinking.