Cindie Gillie is the Director of Operations for Invision Global Network (IGN) a non-profit organization serving the whole person in an effort to eradicate every form of poverty throughout the world. She brings passion and dedication as well as personal and business experience to endeavors she engages in. Cindie graduated in 1994 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and recently completed her Master’s degree in International Development from Eastern University in St. David’s PA. Vocationally working for IGN since 2007 and the previous 12 years in corporate America managing people, projects, and programs she learned many valuable business skills in program and project management, communication, leadership, and the value that comes from working as a team. A high integrity and capable individual she is consistent and committed to the programs and people she works with. Cindie also brings extensive volunteer experience including mentoring, serving as the volunteer lighting director at her church, leading a small group, as well as participating in both national and international short term serving trips. She is passionate about helping people identify how they are created and encouraging and supporting their process of personal growth and life transformation. To see the potential in others and help them to see it too and then watching people take steps toward their potential is exciting to Cindie. Working with the international community is another area of interest for Cindie. She has spent time throughout the world including Thailand, Laos, India, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and Kenya, South Africa and Uganda in Africa.
Tim is the Executive Director and founder of Invision Global Network. He has served with hundreds of volunteers in dozens of countries during the past 20 years. He spent more than three years as a professional photographer prior to dedicating himself to the full-time work of volunteer service learning programs that provide training, mentoring and facilitate transformational experiences designed to promote holistic community development throughout the world.
Tim has lived in England, Mexico and spent three years in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic where he served as the International Teams Coordinator for Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois. Tim graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Interpersonal Communications and Group Dynamics from Western Michigan University and has a Masters degree in Organizational Leadership from Eastern University, St. Davids, PA. Tim is passionate about helping people find their place and purpose in life, loves music, the outdoors, techie stuff, cooking, being creative, playing the guitar, and staying active with competitive sports. He is committed to living the highest quality of life, mind, body and spirit.
Education:
Equipping people to better understand themselves and the world around them.
Empowerment:
Declining to do something for someone they could do for themselves and supporting them in their efforts.
Mobilization:
Moving people to action by committing to go, serve and learn how to help the under-resourced by getting involved in a short-term serving experience.
Holism:
Helping and serving people by addressing their spiritual, physical, emotional and economical needs.
Partnership:
Participating together in one common cause.
Mission Statement:
Striving to eradicate the various forms of poverty throughout the world, we help people live wholely, mind, body and spirit by engaging them in the practice of personal and community development.
INVISION GLOBAL NETWORK helps engage organizations and individuals in the practice of personal and community development. We use service-learning trips as a catalyst to challenge people’s perceptions of the themselves and the world around them and we encourage organizations and individuals to be more intentional and responsible with their resources so that together we can create a more hope-filled future.
It is because we recognize that irrespective of gender, race, color, culture, age or socio-economic status, people everywhere have had the fundamental need to find significance, purpose and passion in life. It is for this reason that INVISION GLOBAL NETWORK came into being. Through strategic partnerships, training and service/learning experiences we facilitate a process that helps people see both inside and outside of themselves; the micro and macro view of the world and how each one of us fit into it. We have found that when people are challenged to make a departure from what is familiar, serve selflessly and participate in community with others that self-actualization really begins to take place. INVISION GLOBAL NETWORK serves those who are searching for purpose, meaning and fulfillment; who have grown tired of living either in the world of the mundane and monotonous or that of the high stress, high pressure world of the ambitious and aggressive. We care deeply about people’s health (mind, body and spirit) and invite them to join us on a journey of transformation as we challenge them and encourage them to live holistically healthy lives – physically, emotionally and spiritually.
It was in the summer of 1987 when Tim Salmonson, the founder of IGN first experienced what it was like to leave the comforts of middle-class America to volunteer on a week-long serving project in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee.
After college, Tim served in a church in Plymouth, England for some time, traveled throughout Europe and then moved to Florida to lead the youth program at a dynamic, very rapidly growing church. This was the most formative time in Tim’s life, a time when he came to realize the transformative power of serving others. In 1999 Tim moved to Mexico to pursue a life-long dream of immersing himself into another culture, experiencing new customs and learning another language. It was a wonderful experience, but there was still the question of vocation. It was only months later that Tim was attending a training program at Willow Creek Community Church in S. Barrington, IL where he met the Willow Extension Ministry staff. Conversation would eventually lead to interviews and interviews led to a staff position as the Teams Coordinator in the Dominican Republic. Three years later that program would be, “downsized” leaving Tim to ask the question, “O.K. God, what’s next?” After almost four years of living overseas, travels to dozens of countries and having seen both the positive and negative effects of short-term missions, missionary work and development and relief programs, it was time to start thinking about a new paradigm of engaging people in social issues. In October of 2004, Invision Global Network (IGN) began to take shape. A board was formed and efforts to design an effective strategy to help people develop a lifestyle of inner reflection which would then be translated into outward acts of service. Today, IGN continues to develop partnerships and serve people throughout the world through training programs, seminars, service-learning trips and mentoring programs. Our desire is that every individual would come to understand his or her unique value and purpose in hopes that they could live the highest possible quality of life, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.
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