The Dusty Cover used bookstore has closed it’s doors after operating in Winnipeg, Canada’s West End after operating for the last 18-months.
I’ve been following the adventures of Jamie Arpin-Ricci for the last few years at his blog and over on Twitter. It’s been fun to see The Dust Cover go from concept to reality, and I was a bit sad to hear of it shutting it’s doors. As a non-profit business it was a success, but the trouble was getting enough volunteers to staff the store.
The road has certainly not ended for Jamie and the YWAM team in Winnipeg. They have other plans to continue their ministry into the community there.
You can read more about the Dusty Cover, future ministry plans to help with housing for low income families and about the Little Flowers Community here.
After more than 2-years of work YWAM Swaziland has finally become an official Swaziland organisation. This will give the ministry there a lot more freedom in how they operate in the nation.
Around the same time God has also opened the doors for the staff of Youth With a Mission Swaziland to bring themselves closer together on the same property. This helps to build community and reduce costs, which will allow the ministry to grow further in what God’s calling them to.
You can read more about the latest news from YWAM Swaziland, including these latest exciting developments, here.
Youth With A Mission has partnered with many other agencies around the world to work towards the abolition of slavery and human trafficking. At my previous YWAM location in Australia part of what we were doing was “Voice in the Dark” and “The Voice for the Voiceless”. Recently YWAM has partnered with Not for Sale in the fight against human trafficking.
Part of the ministry of Not for Sale is the “Slavery Map“, a site designed to “record and display instances of human trafficking across the globe”. You would be surprised where instances are recorded, as there are a lot of instances recorded in so called “developed” nations. There is even one recorded here in Calgary…
The Slavery Map has started to make an impact on how businesses and people operate, and helps to make these people’s stories heard. You can read about one such incident on the YWAM International Web-site here.
When I opened up my e-mail about two weeks ago I got very excited when I found about a dozen stories submitted to this web-site. Unfortunately though they were all spam.
For the moment I will be shutting down the story submit feature on this site until I find a solution that doesn’t allow through so much spam. I might look at adding a Captcha module to the site or changing the plugin used for submitting the story, but hopefully it will be back on-line soon…
I read a post tonight that me laugh about what else YWAM is an acronym for. Of course it officially stands for “Youth With A Mission“, but there are many other things that it could stand for, and here are a few of my favourites:
Youth Without Any Money
You Will Always Move
Young Women After Men
Young Wolves After Maidens
Yes, We Arrange Marriages
Youth With A Meeting
There are close to a dozen other options for the YWAM acronym on the post I was reading, and you can check them out here.
