About
Andrea Sears is a missionary of 13 years in Costa Rica, and co-founder of the organization giveDIGNITY (www.give-dignity.org). On the field, she has experienced working for an established agency and striking out on her own (with her husband), living in 7 different houses, balancing homeschooling and ministry, coping with financial and emotional distress in the nuclear family, and sending 2 kids off to college (one still at home). A lot of life has happened.
After many years of seeing missionaries come and go, she began to wonder what factors (besides the obvious: direction of God) influenced missionaries in their decision to end their missionary experience. There is much work to be done on the mission field and few willing to do it, so shouldn't we do our best to retain our labor force?
At this point, her pre-missionary self took over. Educated in Psychology ("research and analyze it to find out why," said the voice) and with 13 years of business experience in Human Resources ("do something to fix the labor shortage and retention issues," said the other voice), she wanted to do something. She decided to do a survey and try to learn some things, and then share them in hopes that mission agencies can use the results to help their missionaries have even better experiences.
A furlough year at John Brown University as Missionary-in-Residence gave her the bandwidth and resources (a fabulous research assistant named Katie Rowe) to undertake a survey of returned missionaries about their on-field experiences, and what factors led them to head home.
This blog is a place to publish those results.
After many years of seeing missionaries come and go, she began to wonder what factors (besides the obvious: direction of God) influenced missionaries in their decision to end their missionary experience. There is much work to be done on the mission field and few willing to do it, so shouldn't we do our best to retain our labor force?
At this point, her pre-missionary self took over. Educated in Psychology ("research and analyze it to find out why," said the voice) and with 13 years of business experience in Human Resources ("do something to fix the labor shortage and retention issues," said the other voice), she wanted to do something. She decided to do a survey and try to learn some things, and then share them in hopes that mission agencies can use the results to help their missionaries have even better experiences.
A furlough year at John Brown University as Missionary-in-Residence gave her the bandwidth and resources (a fabulous research assistant named Katie Rowe) to undertake a survey of returned missionaries about their on-field experiences, and what factors led them to head home.
This blog is a place to publish those results.