For many years, Mike Biering has been very active in his church’s organized mission trips to various local sites. One of Mike Biering’s favorite memories of these mission trips is the time he went with the church to a local prison to spend time talking with the inmates. Mike Biering remembers this experience as being very powerful for both him and Sam, the inmate with whom he spoke. Sam, although since being released from prison, still occasionally keeps in contact with Mike Biering.

Coming up, Mike Biering and the church would like to reach out a little further in their efforts. Up until this point, the church has primarily stayed local in its outreach missions. While he is overwhelmingly proud of his church’s efforts at home, the youth director would like to see the church starting to make more of a global impact.

Unfortunately, many dreams of large-scale trips abroad are crushed by the reality of finances, even on the modest living standards of a church mission group. The youth director had all but resigned himself to never seeing his dream become a reality when Mike Biering came to him with an idea.

As a regular participant in community service and a member of a worship band that often performs shows for charity events, Mike Biering has had a fair bit of experience with fundraising for a good cause. He approached his youth director and offered to help organize a fundraiser to raise the money to take the church’s youth group to South America for a weeklong mission trip. The youth director was happy to accept.

“It’s never impossible to get money for the right cause,” Mike Biering says. “You just have to remember that no amount of money is too small to make a difference. Even if we have a bake sale and only make thirty dollars, that’s thirty dollars more than we would have had anyway. That’s one night in a hostel for one person, covered.”

Mike Biering has many plans for how to raise the money necessary to send the youth group to South America. He is thinking both small scale and large scale, from bake sales and carwashes to live shows to hosting a formal dinner.