History

In 1993, our founder Leanna (see Leanna’s story below) an aspiring equestrian, received a chilling dream three nights in a row. In the dream she saw a region of the world in bitter slavery, shackled with huge chains and enslaved to cruel task masters - poverty, human trafficking, superstition and illiteracy. The revelation was so vivid and compelling that within three days she set in motion the sale of her equestrian facility and prepared to set out for the focal point of the darkness.

While living directly with local families in the small towns, participating in their austere lives of suffering and sickness, Leanna understood the way to significant impact was to empower the people themselves to bring hope and healing to their own land. Finding no organization which was doing specifically what she envisioned, with the help of her mom Kathy back home in the US, the organization that would become We Ignite Nations was founded.

The efficient and effective strategies that were employed resulted in significant success in a region of the world considered one of the most dark and difficult, being known as “the graveyard of missions” and a “poisonous hub of human trafficking.” An estimated 30 million children were without proper nutrition and faced abuse and slavery. Through the laid-down lives of our faithful national leaders whom Leanna mentored and empowered, we began to reach out to the most destitute and oppressed.

Our initial projects involved Biblical training for leaders. When these leaders returned to their villages and put into practice what they had learned, people who had been terminally ill were healed and others who had been tormented by demons were liberated. In village after village, people were set free from practices and superstitions which had rendered them miserable and impoverished. They received a new life of hope, peace and joy.

Then Leanna received another word of revelation: “The most Christ-like act a person can do in this life is give a bright future to a child who has no hope.” From that time we initiated our Blue Haven Children’s Home, founded three schools and tuition centers for children who had no access to a good education. Our educational programs have now enabled over 20,000 of the most at-risk kids to have a basic education and a much brighter future.

Vocational and skills training for youth is one of our most high-impact projects. Youth and young adults who had no opportunity to obtain a good education are doomed to a life of poverty unless they have the opportunity to learn a skill. But the skills institutes are extremely expensive and unaffordable to these youth. So over the years we have provided scholarships to hundreds of youth, and in the past five years have developed our own skills training institutes. Our most exciting and recent project is a computer skills institute which attained 80% sustainability in its first year. In 2019 our students won first and second prize in a regional computer knowledge competition.

Anti-trafficking has also been a point of significant success in our history. In 2012 we began researching how to address the human trafficking problem in our main base city in India, a community of 3.5 million population. After training the police force and facilitating successful brothel raids and rescuing the girls into our safe homes, the police force honored our team for helping them solve the hitherto unyielding sex trafficking problem of the city. Now we carry on our anti-trafficking work through production and showings of movies which re-enact the tragedy of child trafficking, and through a traveling drama team which teaches whole villages how to keep their kids safe from traffickers.

Now, we have expanded! WIN Life continues a highly fruitful work of bringing Christ to unreached regions through training of native leaders, Bible distribution and aid of persecuted Christians. Our children’s education, anti-trafficking, community development and vocational training work continues under WIN (We Ignite Nations). WIN leverages proven strategies with fresh vision to achieve multiplied global impact. WIN believes that poverty, illiteracy and oppression are trespassers in Planet Earth. To the extent that communities align themselves with Jubilee - the Principles of Freedom - those communities will “win” at life! They will experience transformation from hopelessness to hope, from darkness to light and from turmoil to peace.