It started with a plane ticket.

We Connect and Serve didn't start with a business plan. It started with a plane ticket.

Years ago, Brad and his friend Jared Lowry began traveling to Colombia. Jared had served a religious mission there, and the two of them would visit schools, look for needs, and do what they could. It was simple work, and it was supposed to be a one-time thing. Then they came home and told people about it, and something they didn't expect happened: everybody wanted to come along. So they started taking groups down, friends first, then friends of friends, and together they started the Just One Foundation.

When conditions in Colombia got unsafe enough that they didn't feel right bringing people there anymore, they didn't stop. They went looking for somewhere else, and that search led them to Guatemala. They started visiting schools and orphanages and asking the same question they'd always asked: what do you actually need? They met a woman running an orphanage, and they got to work.

Today Brad and his wife Miran run We Connect and Serve as their own thing, still partnered with Jared and the Just One Foundation, still asking that same question.

The beds came out of a room.

Groups staying overnight noticed how many children were sleeping on the floor. Not for lack of a home, but for lack of a bed. They found a Guatemalan carpenter willing to supply bed kits, and volunteers started building bunk beds for families.

Then they noticed something else. Families were cooking over open flames inside their houses, breathing the smoke day after day. So they found a company that supplied safe cookstoves, and that became part of the work too.

Beds and stoves. Two simple things that change how a family sleeps, eats, and breathes.

Then Miran brought the dentists.

Miran Ho is a dentist herself. She ran her own charity work through a nonprofit, bringing dental practitioners to Guatemala to care for children and families. Those practitioners often brought their spouses, who showed up ready to serve and needed somewhere to put that energy. Brad and Miran had an answer: come build beds, come install stoves.

Brad and Miran's own story runs through the same country. They lived only a few miles apart in Arizona and had each been running charity work about thirty minutes apart, but they didn't meet until Mexico, when Brad overheard Miran talking about Guatemala. That conversation was the start of it. They married, and the two missions became one.

To make the work sustainable, the team moved much of its effort closer to where the volunteers were staying, in a village called Yalú. That's where the work is centered today.