Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Gibbs.
Paul, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I started our organization in Manchester UK in 1992.
Working with schools, churches, and other agencies, I began to recruit ‘Life-Mentors’ for young people from around the world to help teenagers in Manchester.
In 2005, we moved to Arlington Texas to set up an international Headquarters.
We now have teams in 14 nations and on 6 continents of the world – these are all resourced and trained from our Global Headquarters next to the Rangers Stadium.
Has it been a smooth road?
I think when you start to pioneer, people can believe in you but not ‘it’.
So, there were a lot of sacrifices to get things started because my wife and I needed to finance what we did. This was difficult as in the early days we earned very little money and had to get different jobs. We lived in the most deprived part of England.
There were several murders on our doorstep of young people which made us more determined but made it difficult to bring up our own children. One teenage girl was murdered by our neighbors – she was first tortured for a week. Her name is Susan Caper – you can find details of this on Wikipedia.
Now, we have grown, our issues are letting enough people know about what we do. Our organization has opportunities for thousands of Life-Mentors to help young people, but getting the word out is difficult. We offer young adults an apprenticeship, full training, accommodation, meals and an opportunity to do this on every continent of the world (except the Antarctic).
Many of the churches we help do not know what we do (although that is changing somewhat) and this has limited our ability to recruit young adults as we are a faith-based non-profit.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
So, we are a non-profit.
We train young adults how to mentor, coach, encourage, inspire young people.
We are now international and have teams/offices in the following nations:
USA, Canada, Pakistan, England, Brasil, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Germany, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and India.
We are a faith-based organization and work with churches, orphanages, schools and other agencies.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Yes, it is.
We have many people who open up their homes for our staff and apprentices, either short-term for training or long-term.
Many become like family members.
Pricing:
- Only that we can recruit, train, place and manage a Life-Mentor for around $1250 per year.
- We also offer Masterclasses in Team Building, Mentoring etc. these start at around $500
Contact Info:
- Website: www.paismovement.com
- Email: info@paismovement.com
- Facebook: paulcgibbs
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
