In Loyangalani, on the shore of Lake Turkana, thirteen women started a CHE group in September 2025 — fruit of training that first reached the region in 2021. They began with lessons on raising lambs and keeping their homes and village clean, then moved to baking scones to sell and saving together...
From Arizona to Albania to Chiapas — see why MAI keeps showing up at the world's largest gathering for wholistic missions, and the stories that make it worth the trip.
When a young Mbya Guarani mother's plea for a home of her own led to family rejection and despair, a village assembly—moved by a chief's son's call to listen to women—brought her husband back home. It's a glimpse of how quiet, relationship-based ministry is reshaping cultural norms from within.
From Arizona to Albania to Chiapas — see why MAI keeps showing up at the world's largest gathering for wholistic missions, and the stories that make it worth the trip.
Recently, Tim and I sat down with our research partners at Meros to talk through exactly what we're measuring and why. It's a longer conversation, but an honest one — including the parts where we don't have it all figured out yet...
When an old friend asked Steve to name MAI’s mission and vision, he stumbled. So he went back to the stories that move him: a mushroom farm in Indonesia, women sharing Scripture and forgiveness, a community that once chased the team away. What he found there was a simpler, truer statement of why MAI exists.
When a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck off Flores Island, Indonesia, thousands of families lost their homes. MAI’s trusted local partners are on the ground providing shelter, clean water, food support for household kitchens, and psychosocial care for women and children. Your gift supports this response and strengthens MAI’s Disaster Response Fund for the next crisis.
After years of measuring reach, MAI is asking a harder question: what were we actually counting? Here’s why we’re shifting from counting communities touched to tracking the ones that truly take root.
In July and August we received video clips and photos from a missionary in the DRC who was on a month-long ministry trip to a remote area of the DRC called the Kwango region. Through 10 short one-minute videos we shared the missionary's journey in a raw, as-it-happened format.
Reflecting on Jesus’ exchange with the Sadducees in Matthew 22, Steve makes the case that leadership’s greatest return isn’t in buildings, budgets, or quick results. It’s in people: equipped leaders, mentored young people, and empowered churches whose impact multiplies across families and generations.
Explore MAI’s 2025 Annual Report and see the impact your partnership made possible last year. In his introduction, CEO Steve Otradovec reflects on his first year leading MAI and shares where the ministry is headed next: going deeper rather than wider, through a new framework called Transformation Hubs.
Lasting change can’t be handed to someone from the outside; it has to grow from within. Meet Sharon, an MAI partner in Ethiopia who sits with women, listens, and helps them discover what they’re already capable of. Watch the short video and see how the women she serves become leaders who transform their own communities.
When the city tore out a beaver dam near Steve’s Colorado home, his neighborhood app erupted. But that creek is a flood-mitigation corridor protecting thousands of homes downstream. Steve reflects on what that moment reveals about leadership...
In 2025, MAI’s network of trainers, partners, and pastors showed up in some of the world’s most broken places: displaced families near Goma and in South Sudan, flood survivors in Haiti, failed harvests in Kenya, and storm-hit communities in Cuba and Northern Sumatra. See where $31,870 in disaster response went, and how MAI is preparing communities for the crises still to come.
The good shepherd leaves the 99 to find the one lost sheep, but what happens to the 99 while he’s gone? Reflecting on his first year as CEO, Steve wrestles honestly with the tension between loving individuals and stewarding the health of the whole organization, and shares where he’s landed so far.
After joining community programs, Mark championed education for his family, empowering his wife, supporting his children, and growing as a leader...
Each week in Central Asia, IDMM discovery groups gather to pray, study Scripture, learn practical health skills, and look for ways to love their neighbors. Across sixteen groups in ten communities, that love is taking shape in everyday acts, like a woman paying school fees for two children who couldn’t afford them, and another covering an elderly man’s bus fare, and twenty-one people came to faith last quarter.
A durian Blizzard at a Dairy Queen in Cambodia gave Steve a laugh, and a leadership lesson. Drawing on Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees about tradition, he reflects on how a forty-year-old organization can tell the difference between traditions worth keeping and habits nobody dares to question.
A 2004 photo of Steve holding house plans brings back two hard lessons: a family standing aside while his team built their home, and a kind gesture in Honduras that sparked a scramble among two dozen kids. He reflects on how good intentions can miss the mark, and why the most transformational work he’s seen comes from communities acting on their own ideas and potential.
The first 1,000 days of life, from conception to the end of two years, is critical for each child. Learn how MAI programs addresses the nutritional needs that impact a child’s potential over his or her entire life.
Listen to the story of how God changed the lives of Tassi and her community through the work of MAI.
Learn some of the basic ways that MAI works with villages to help them live happier and better lives.
This story highlights a recent trip to Riohacha, Colombia, where Medical Ambassadors International partnered with a local church to strengthen child health, family wellbeing, and community discipleship through the First Thousand Days program. By training local facilitators and supporting ongoing CHE ministry, the team witnessed growing hope and renewed commitment to holistic transformation among the Wayúu communities.
After years of reacting with frustration and regret, a mother in Alexandria discovered a new way to parent through a women’s class at her local church. As she embraced gentleness, community, and Christ-centered encouragement, her home began to transform—revealing how small shifts in the heart can bring lasting peace and renewed hope for families.
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