How You Can Help

Purchase any new winter coat or donate a washed, gently used one, sizes 2T-Adult Large

Help build a Welcome Kit of household items like blankets, towels, and pots through an online registry

Donate to an emergency fund for rent and legal expenses

Update: You made a difference!

Through your loving contributions to our Advent Gift, Resurrection was able to:  provide three new refugee families with household items, raise over $18,000 toward an emergency fund for asylum seekers, and donate more than 80 warm winter coats to World Relief clients. Thank you for your generosity! 

Advent Gift 2020 is now closed; Advent Gift 2021 will be announced in November.

Contribute to our Advent Gift through January 11.

All Welcome Kit items have been purchased, but you can still donate to the emergency fund or contribute warm winter coats.

Please leave coats in RezCafe near the Advent Gift table or inside the East Vestibule door, Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm.

Coats purchased online may be shipped to:
Church of the Resurrection
Attn: Advent Gift
935 W. Union Ave
Wheaton, IL 60187

All coats will be delivered to World Relief after January 11.

Questions? Contact Missions Manager Julia Damion at juliadamion@churchrez.org

Loving our neighbors as ourselves

Every Advent season, Resurrection chooses to give our time and resources to one of our local ministries. This year we are blessing World Relief and the refugee families and asylum seekers they serve in DuPage/Aurora. Your gift will help provide basic needs to our neighbors—a warm winter coat, blankets, pots and household supplies, and emergency funds for rent and legal fees.

Show Christ’s love to resilient refugee families and asylum seekers

This year’s hardships have been devastating for refugees and asylum seekers on financial, legal, and personal fronts. Many hard-working men and women have lost jobs and critical immigration meetings have been canceled or delayed. Asylum seekers, who cannot legally work yet, face difficulties advancing their applications and dreams of a lasting safe haven. For both groups isolation is a daily struggle that the pandemic has only exacerbated.

Meet our talented neighbors in Chicagoland:

on the front lines

Hana and Sona, twin sisters, help patients battling COVID-19 in the western suburbs. They know what it feels like to be in danger. The sisters fled religious persecution in Iraq, but struggled to speak English when they arrived in 2006. Thanks to World Relief volunteers, they learned enough to pursue medical careers, sleeping just 2-3 hours a night to study English. Today Sona is a respiratory therapist at Delnor Hospital in Geneva and Hana a phlebotomist for Elmhurst Hospital.

sharing the love

Brenda is helping families in crisis, inspired by the generosity of others since she gained asylum last fall. When the pandemic hit, the 20-year-old suddenly lost her laundromat job and housing. World Relief DuPage and a local church provided emergency funds for an apartment deposit while she job hunted. Encouraged, Brenda recently raised enough funds on social media to provide rice, soap and oil for strangers, a family in need in her native Nicaragua. Now she’s on a mission to equip people to champion causes in their own communities.

small business, big hearts

Brothers Mohammad and Abdollah, refugees from war-torn Afghanistan, realized their dream to launch a tailor and dry cleaning shop this January in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. After reeling from the pandemic, they quickly pivoted their shop and began working 12 to 14 hours a day to make affordable masks for neighboring immigrants and others. Mohammad says it’s all worth it to fulfill their three simple goals: “Help our people. Make people more safe. Do our best to make our products the best.”

More than ever, these resilient men, women and children need to know that they are welcomed and loved. World Relief’s continued support is made possible by churches and local communities who help them thrive. Our partnership helps enable World Relief to provide holistic care in Jesus’ name with the purpose of welcoming  “strangers” into our midst.