Meet Javier Mendoza of Connect Global

Today we’d like to introduce you to Javier Mendoza.

Javier, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My wife, Danielle Mendoza, and I started our relationship after leading and participating in several humanitarian relief trips to the New Orleans area directly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We were a part of two separate groups working together to clear homes and streets of debris and trees, as well as distribute hundreds of gallons of water and food.

Our teams completed several trips to Louisiana in the weeks following the storm, and we stayed in touch every day throughout. We were engaged the next year and went on a mission trip to Honduras together in 2006. I had been helping lead teams to this country since 2004 with Travis & Gina Moffitt who we would later co-found Connect Global with.

On this trip to Honduras, I mentioned to Danielle the idea of living in Honduras one day to help the community better than we could from home. Danielle and I were married in July 2006 and began our journey of working and serving together. We led several more teams to Honduras and began forging a path to focus more and more on what we could do to sustainably help those in need of basics, like education, clean water, food, and other solvable problems.

In 2010, we welcomed our daughter, Saige, into the world and knew from day one we would all be working together to make a difference anywhere we could. One year later, in July of 2011, we officially launched Connect Global. We started with just about $1000 and were certain that if nobody else could give or go we could make it happen, and on our first Connect Global trip we raised enough money to build five small fish farms.

Since then, we have traveled to Honduras, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, Thailand, & in 2018 sent a team to Venezuela to help in the refugee crisis. We have built fish farms, started school scholarship programs at 3 schools, we helped initiate and will maintain a soon to be complete 23 bed Maternity Home in Honduras, we have provided emergency first aid training to first responders, we have built homes for single moms, poured concrete floors for widows, and we have completed several clean water projects.

We work closely with local members of the community to provide care, resources, and encouragement of locally driven projects. We work with four main groups to accomplish all of this: Local Schools, Local Hospitals, Local Businesses, & the Local Church. We believe that we are able to get so much done because we major in relationships.

We rely on local community leaders to show us what problems need addressing, we partner with local business owners to supply materials and workers, and we complete projects that will positively affect a community holistically. I like to say that Compassion without Action is just Observation. All of us at Connect Global have decided that our responsibility is to take action when and where we can and help others to do the same.

We lead about 50-60 people a year on short-term trips (1-4 weeks) in which we help Doctors, Teachers, Mothers, and Business Leaders alike observe the opportunities that exist to make a difference in someone’s life and then take action. Whether it is to build a sustainable food source, provide access to clean water or a sanitary concrete floor, we are connecting people in a meaningful way to the needs of this world. As we head into a new year with Connect Global, we also have our sights on a new goal.

We are planning to launch a School of Missions in which those who have the desire to make an impact in a more full-time manor can have the tools, educational resources, and organizational backing to make that desire a reality. Students will learn practical, physical & spiritual ways to make a very sustained, positive change around the world.

Over the years our family members, our friends, along with several business owners and church leaders have come alongside us and supported this work. We have a full-time partner overseas, and together our two families lead about 6-8 trips a year to share this vision with as many people as we can, and together we are accomplishing a great deal more than we ever could alone.

Has it been a smooth road?
When we first launched Danielle, and I decided to move out of a 4 br house on the golf course with, our newly born daughter, Saige into a one-room cabin. It was owned by a church, and we could rent the place for $400 plus maintenance on the property such as clearing the dirt road of debris and clearing the lake of weeds and tall grass.

It was hot in the summers and freezing in the winters, there was no clean water, and there were holes in the floor, but it living there afforded us the ability to launch a non-profit organization without taking a paycheck. We worked our side hustles in addition to forming and growing Connect Global just to make ends meet.

We always prioritized the mission and still to this day will decide to complete a project overtaking a paycheck. We do this so that people can be confident that when they give to Connect Global, they are giving directly to those who are in need. We have a couple of close friends who help us cover admin costs and our overhead such as internet and phone bill, but 100% of public donations given to specific causes throughout the year actually go towards those causes.

We lived in that cabin for three years, before moving to Honduras for one year in order to understand even more clearly how people live in a developing nation and to deepen and strengthen our partnerships in Honduras. These years have been tough and insecure at times, but I believe it has brought our family closer together and has better equipped us to be the biggest blessing to others we possibly can.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
We specialize in making the connection between someone who wants to get involved in charitable work overseas but may not know where to start. We lead short 1 & 2 week trips to international places where we have a very well established network of partners and nationally run organizations that make it easy for someone to jump right in and serve.

We have a tagline that is simply, Go Serve Change. We provide the place to go, you jump in and serve, and together we can make a positive change in the world. We provide education scholarships, access to clean water and food sources, medical treatment and training, as well as business and church leadership support.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
People want to see where their money is going and to be more directly involved with the recipients of their charitable giving.

It makes sense that people want to be partnered with organizations who grant this level of access. They want to see the change they are implementing on a deeper level and know how their partnership is affecting the world. Connect Global prioritizes transparency and involvement from our donors at all levels.

From the beginning, we have partnered with and promoted local leaders as the experts in the process. Solutions are often very near to the problem; we only need a fresh set of eyes to see it. We offer our fresh eyes as well as our hands to those in need. Sometimes all you need is a gentle push onward toward the goal. Our partners realize they are capable of creating solutions while building positive momentum in their own communities with their own neighbors.

It is often asked of all of us to “imagine what could get done if no one cared who got the credit”… At Connect Global we don’t have to imagine, we get to see it with every project that gets completed.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://GoServeChange.com
• Phone: 214-725-4352
• Email: javier@goservechange.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iconnectglobal/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ConnectGlobal/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/iconnectglobal

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