President’s Annual Report 2020

Dr. Ravi Jayakaran

President / CEO

20/20 is the number the optician uses to indicate perfect vision. The number was significant enough to consider it a major milestone in the journey of any organization. Medical Ambassadors International reached a significant milestone in 2020, the 40th year of its existence; yet like millions of organizations around the globe we too were blindsided when reality hit us. The year ended up becoming the most challenging one ever because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As in the previous year, we continued to strive for improving quality, efficiency, and professionalism at all levels. We persevered relentlessly with our ongoing work and in our efforts to grow and expand our CHE (Community Health Evangelism) program. We added another 31 communities in 2020, totaling 2,613 communities across 75 countries around the world and now impact over 2.61 million people. Our efforts to grow the second line leadership in South America, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia are progressing well. We successfully launched our technical division and have three new specialized programs to add to the earlier two.

These are:

• New special programs: Community Relief response, Trafficking prevention and the Medical Ambassadors International Academy

• Ongoing special programs: Tele-Medicine, Coffee Business as Mission, Focus on children with disabilities

Early assumptions that the COVID-19 crisis would change turned out to be wrong, so we geared up to adapt, change and modify our Modus Operandi to be able to provide virtual training programs, and use all available technology to still be able to carry out training programs both in the US and abroad. The third-party assessment carried out by the globally recognized philanthropic advisors Calvin Edwards & Company (CEC) have once again listed MAI as being among the top ten Christian organizations with a high return on investment for the Kingdom of God (read report here).

We continue to ‘make wholistic disciples, who make wholistic disciples’ and thus facilitating what we pray for in the Lord’s prayer (Mathew 6:10) “bring heaven to earth, one community at a time.” At the time of preparing this report, we are pleased to report that MAI has received the honor of being one of the top 10 organizations in the world for the fourth time.

A Brief Overview of 2020

Our engagement with the Barnabas Group has continued as we have worked closely with their advisory teams to improve our resource mobilizing strategy. This has done well as can be seen from our financial report later in this document. MAI’s team of field CHE trainers continues to be effective, expanding their facilitation skills with community vision casting. They train CHE committees, CHE volunteers, and where the context determines, specialized CHE programs focusing on women’s issues, families, men, children and the disabled. Our quest for new approaches has fostered new relationships and partnerships with other agencies to train our lead trainers. After an initial set back during the early stages of the Covid crisis, modified training approaches were adapted and you will see from the report about the increased training programs facilitated.

In the year ahead we have the following areas that we will focus on:

We will continue to strengthen the new communities that we have recently added to our program and work towards strengthening their capacity through training and regular follow up. We plan to launch an ambitious Capital Campaign to increase the overall revenue of the organization so that we can continue to grow more, to reach more to bring more into God’s Kingdom. A feasibility study is planned for the first quarter of 2021 following which we will launch the campaign. The Capital Campaign is planned with the Focus Group (TFG). The year ahead will also be one of consolidating some of the partnerships we have established, with special emphasis on working together as examples of effective Christian partnerships and collaboratives. As part of our engagement with the Lausanne Movement we are also planning to have more information available at a central site on Integral Mission.

We seek the Lord’s face and ask that He continues to open our eyes to see what He is doing so we can partner with Him in the expansion of His kingdom!