Charmaine Hedding of Shai Fund

International Religious Freedom Summit 2024

Transcription completed by AI software, please excuse any misspellings or typos present.

Leray Heyne  0:00  

Hello, my name is Leray Heyne and when the Lord gave me the vision for the Jesus Christ CEOs Media, I asked him why he wanted a state-of-the-art media ministry that would rival the best media organizations in the world. And Holy Spirit replied, I want to tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. I think you will agree. CBS is not sending 60 minutes to my door anytime soon asking me to do a weekly segment on what Jesus is doing in business. Amen. It is for this reason we are asking for your corporate covenant partnership. When your company gives to JC CEO Media, you are giving to a ministry that is committed to revolutionize the Christian Broadcasting with virtual reality filming studios at the core of our content creation strategy, our studios around the world will be immersed in cutting edge technology that gives JC CEOs Media professional capabilities for creating visually stunning TV shows, documentaries and movies that will tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. Owners with your company's faithful generosity JC CEO TV will proclaim in 190 nations on seven continents, the power and good news of what Jesus is doing in their nation's public squares of business. So right now, we are inviting you to join JC CEOs TV as a corporate covenant partner of the world's first Christian television network consecrated to tell the world what Jesus is doing in business. Thank you for your corporate partnership, and may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. God bless you.

Leray Heyne  2:09  

Hello, Leray Heyne here again with Jesus Christ CEOs and we're at day two of the International Religious Freedom Summit. And today I am here with Charmaine. Hello, Charmaine.

Charmaine Hedding  2:22  

Good to be here with you today. 

Leray Heyne  2:23  

Thank you for stopping by in your busy schedule, appreciate it. Introduce yourself to our audience and tell them a little bit about all the vast stuff that you do. And then we'll narrow down to what we're going to talk about. 

Charmaine Hedding  2:34  

Sure. So, I work for an organization called the Shai Fund. I'm the founder, and I'm also on the F Secretariat. So that's part of the managing body that's here today that is engaged globally, on religious freedom issues and working to promote article 18, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But Shia Fund is more of a practical expression on how do we go into areas where we see massive persecution, or we see violations of article 18, of freedom of religion and belief, and how do we practically sustain, encourage, and come alongside the persecuted church and other religious minorities?

Leray Heyne  2:34  

And a minute ago, you told us there's some aspects that you do around business that's associated with it. Yeah. Tell our audience what that's all about. 

Charmaine Hedding  3:25  

So when you have a genocide that's happened, or massive persecution of some religious minority group, like we saw in the Nineveh Plains, and in Iraq, and in Syria, when the Islamic State or known in the in the area as dash came into the area and established a caliphate, they then committed a genocide against the religious minorities, specifically targeting the Christians and the Yazidis. And they killed them. And they are they maimed many of them. They took many of them as sex slaves and sold them in markets across the Middle East. And the community fled, and they left the entire area. And they had had a presence in this area since the time of Jesus Christ, when the disciples went through this area and told the good news of what had happened. And so the entire community fled within a couple of hours. And most of them fled north and some of them went abroad. And when the coalition forces managers managed to get rid of ISIS, and the community was able to return to their homeland, to the land that they've been for over 2000 years speaking Aramaic, the same language that Jesus spoke, how do you sustain and build up this community? Well, I believe one of the ways that we can get involved is through business. And that's to help them economically because at the end of the day, if you can't pay your bills, if you can't feed your family, and if you can't send your children to school, you won't remain in in this area. And we will lose the Christian community in the Middle East. And so we opened small businesses. And we've opened over 110 of them to support the Christian community in Iraq that have suffered this terrible genocide.

Leray Heyne  5:16  

And how do you do that? How do you open up businesses and what kind of training and things are offered?

Charmaine Hedding  5:21  

Yeah. So you know, one of the things that when you look at this area of the world, a lot of the families are a family run businesses. So they've got an historical, the grandparent passed it down to the Father passed it down to the sons, and it's really the backbone of the economy. So we went in, and we asked the families that had had businesses that ISIS had looted and destroyed, and they'd lost everything. And we went back and said to them, what is your business and they would say to us, well, we had a mechanic store. So we would go in, open it, work with them to open it to get it just enough to open and open that mechanic store with the tools that it needed. And I'll never forget, the first business was the mechanic store. And we opened it in the morning, and that afternoon, I had four or five cars with their bonnets open that they were working on them. Fantastic.

Leray Heyne  6:12  

Oh, my. And do you do? Do you give micro loans, do you give them grants? How are you doing that?

Charmaine Hedding  6:19  

So what we do is it's community based, so we work within communities. And we go in and we do a grant to each family. And it's just enough to buy the assets to get them up and running. Because it was a complete genocide. So oftentimes, we even have to go in and do generators for electricity, because there was nothing left of the infrastructure in the whole area because of the war. And then because it's community driven, we feel that they need to give back to the community. So after over a period of two years, we take back part of that grant that we give, and that goes towards another business. And that way, they can see the benefits of the whole community and business people who have common values, kingdom values, working together to uplift their own community.

Leray Heyne  7:08  

And what are some of the other benefits, the intangibles that you might see happening from that.

Charmaine Hedding  7:14  

So it's been incredible to see that what's happened and that some of the families who had young people that had fled to Europe actually came back, because they had hope, and they had a future. And the second thing that I thought was very important was that it gave the people a sense that we hadn't forgotten them. But more than that, that we were able to be very practical in our assistance. I always say that we should pray for the persecuted church. But we should also sustain them practically. And this is a way to do that. And to let them know that we haven't forgotten the Christians in the Middle East. Because if they weren't there, yeah, we wouldn't be here.

Leray Heyne  7:54  

Yeah, yeah. So how do people find out about your organization? And can they business people who are loving what you're saying right now want to partner with you? How do they get involved? 

Charmaine Hedding  8:05  

Yeah, so they can go to our website. It's www.theshaifund.org. And shai is spelled s-h-i. So it's theshaifund.org. And you can donate to a business for as little as $5,000 you can help a family and sustain over 33 people, which is our average number that we're sustaining with a business donation of $5,000. 

Leray Heyne  8:33  

Wow.So tell us you're the founder. What's the name? Where's the inspiration for the name and where does it come from? 

Charmaine Hedding  8:37  

So shai means gift in Hebrew, Aramaic, and because I believe Jesus is the greatest gift that we could ever receive.

Leray Heyne  8:48  

Wonderful, I love it. I love it. Well, I want to thank you for sitting down and telling us a little bit about your organization and tying it into I know you do so many different things, but you gave our audience business people all around the world at a taste of something they might not be aware of. So like myself here today, so thank you.

Charmaine Hedding  9:04  

Thank you for having me. Yeah. 

Leray Heyne  9:05  

God bless you. 

Charmaine Hedding  9:06  

And you.