About C2BU

Do you have the courage to be you, the you I created? This simple, yet profound question came to C2BU Founder Jenny Williamson one night, straight from the heart of God. This question is what ultimately led her on a journey to discover a purpose and passion for her life. Although Jenny had held some type of job since the age of 15, no accomplishment or moment of satisfaction had ever satisfied the deep desire in her heart to make a difference in the world. On the eve of Jenny’s 40th birthday, through a series of events, she decided to make a deliberate decision to begin living life intentionally, rather than reacting to whatever life threw her way. Her first intentional choice was to go in search of the God whom she believed in as a little girl. What she discovered surprised her. She not only found God, she found herself! What Jenny learned through her own self-discovery process is that the journey of purpose is not always easy. It requires a large dose of courage to be and do all you were created to. C2BU was founded to give people the encouragement and resources they need to be who they were created to be. Through Courage Conferences, Courage Houses, Courage Cafés, Courage Publications, and Courage Volunteers, Jenny and her team work to help others realize they were created on purpose for a purpose.

Our vision is big, bold and we believe, God inspired…

Courage Concerts

 

 

Courage Merchandise

 

 

Courage Conferences

 

 

Courage Café

Courage Publications

The purpose of Courage House is to provide a safe, loving environment, with a comprehensive, holistic approach in mental health, psychosocial and educational services, in an RCL-12 group home setting for minors aged 11-17 who are victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

However, Courage House will be more than a typical “group home,” it will be a place where hope is given, healing is offered, and lives are restored by people who love and believe in them. The young women who come to Courage House will receive tangible resources to equip, encourage, and empower them to discover and fulfill their unique purpose. This goal is based on the vision that every person is uniquely created on purpose for a purpose. Commercial sexual exploitation robs these young victims of their identity, their value, and self-esteem. Restoring their identity as a valued child of God, with a purpose unique only to them, is the focus at Courage House. To do this, we will provide every possible opportunity to each female victim to find safety, security, hope, and love while offering an array of services targeting trauma and sexual exploitation treatment, recovery, and prevention.

To achieve a diverse blend of services that can be accessed according to each young woman’s individual needs, Courage House’s methodology will incorporate a multidisciplinary approach to treatment inclusive of individual and group therapies. Services will be made available to all of the young women at Courage House according to their individual needs.

The Courage House facility and program is intentionally designed to provide a long term home for female minors who have suffered severe trauma and sexual exploitation, as opposed to an opportunity to graduate from a program. Statistics show the majority of the young women who are victims of this crime do not have safe homes and loving families to return to once they have “graduated from the program.” Thus, “We will call them family.” Courage House offers a long term, comprehensive, holistic approach, unique to each young woman, which will encompass their physical, emotional, educational, psychological, and spiritual needs. All our resources will also include processes to prepare the young woman for a successful transition to self-sufficient, independent living with future plant to open a transitional home, Courage House Too.

It all begins with a Welcome Home celebration for each child that will be loved and embraced as family, as they start their journey of restoration and healing, realizing they were uniquely Created on Purpose for Purpose.

The Unique Life Plan…

WE BELIEVE God is the creator of the universe and the author of all life.

And God created all the great creatures… every living and moving thing. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness…” male and female he created them. Genesis 1:21, 26-27

WE BELIEVE Jesus is God’s son. He came to the earth for a specific purpose and is the only way to the Father.

Jesus said to them, “I am the way, the truth and the light. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6

WE BELIEVE anyone choosing to accept this truth becomes a child of God, and through this intimate relationship with Him will discover their true identity.

“I will live with them and walk among them. I will be their God and they will be my people. Therefore come out from them and be separate. I will then be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters,” says the Lord. 2 Corinthians 6:16, 18

WE BELIEVE before time began God imagined every individual and then formed each life on purpose for a specific purpose.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. Before you were born I set you apart. Jeremiah 1:5, Psalm 139:1-5, or Isaiah 49:1b

WE BELIEVE God’s Holy Spirit provides all the energy, knowledge, and power to fulfill that life’s purpose.

But the counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have said to you. John 14:25

You will have power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you to be my witnesses. Acts 1:8

He will lead you in the path chosen for you. Psalm 22

WE BELIEVE discovering, embracing and choosing to fulfill your God-given purpose is the only way to be free to experience true joy and lasting satisfaction in this life.

Why do you labor at what does not satisfy? Isaiah 55:2

WE BELIEVE each and every individual needs other people in their lives on an ongoing basis to encourage and motivate them towards their life’s purpose, as well as provide a much needed sense of belonging.

Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together as some have but continue to encourage one another. Hebrews 10:24-25

This is the sole purpose of C2BU: to equip, encourage, and empower individuals to discover and embrace their God-given purpose (nothing more, but absolutely refusing to settle for anything less) and to then encourage everyone in their life to do the same. C2BU serves and will hire all people regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, age, or gender.

“It’s a home… It’s a home… It’s a home.”

Those words were whispered to my spirit one Sunday morning four years ago. I was sitting in church, like I have for most every Sunday morning, all of my life. I am originally from Mississippi where the vast majority of people come out of the womb Christian. In the God-fearing families of the Deep South, you aren’t offered a choice. (Oh, they may let you choose what flavor of Christianity you prefer to practice, but I didn’t even get that. ) I was christened Methodist and raised Southern Baptist. Sprinkled and dunked. My destiny was determined: church every time the doors opened and when I died, Heaven.

In all those years of church attendance, I never once walked through the doors expecting my life to change. But it did just that one Sunday in 2007.

I sat engulfed in the huge auditorium waiting for the service to begin. Three thousand other church goers surrounded me. I didn’t know a single one. I was feeling lonely and melancholy that day. Our family had just relocated to Sacramento, California from the Bay Area … not by our choice but by the divine hand of God. The vehicle He used to move us was not only a moving van, but financial ruin. Our family was devastated. We lost our home, we missed our friends, and we longed for the comfortable life we had created in the Bay Area. I could see no divine purpose in the move. Daily, to keep my spirit up, I chanted a verse I had adopted and paraphrased as my own… “Against all hope and in spite of her circumstances, Jenny like Abraham, chose to believe God had the power to do what He promised.” (Romans 4:18-25)

During this difficult time, God felt very near and kept whispering encouragement to my soul. “Don’t reduce the size of your dreams and desires to accommodate your present circumstances – they won’t fit,” he whispered one early morning. If I had not known Him intimately, the words would have seemed cruel in the midst of our circumstances. I had started a non-profit organization, Courage to Be You, Inc. with two friends in the Bay Area where God had planted enormous dreams on our hearts. I believed in the fulfillment of each one of them… spiritual daughters, Courage Conferences around the world, resource centers to equip, encourage, and empower individuals to be and do all God created them to, audiences of thousands … But when our family was forced to move by the unseen hand of God, I wondered how or even if they would ever come to fruition. At the time, it took all my strength and faith just to survive, one day at a time.

That was my mind and heart on that Sunday morning in 2007. Little did I know my life was about to be recalibrated. When the guest pastor began to speak, so did God…

“It’s a home… It’s a home… It’s a home.”

The pastor didn’t preach that morning. Instead he told of his own life change. With his words, he painted a picture I had not seen before: sex trafficking.

The phrase was totally unfamiliar to me. He told of children in Cambodia, as young as five years old, being systematically sold to men for sex. Sold as if they were a commodity with no value, no feelings or purpose. My body was literally racked with sobs, much to my teen aged sons’ embarrassment. At one point in the service, I looked around to see if I was the only one pierced by the images created in my mind’s eye. I felt I was the only one of the thousands attending that day who could hear these childrens’ cries, feel the trauma they had endured, and see the pain in their eyes.

“It’s a home.”

What seemed like hours later when it was only minutes, Don Brewster (the guest pastor) began to tell how his life had changed when he learned of the plight of these Cambodian children. It was simple. When he and his wife Bridget learned of this hideous crime against children from a TV show they watched, they knew they had to do something. So they did what any of us would do: they quit their jobs, sold everything they owned, and moved to Cambodia to start a home for children rescued from the sex slave trade. Simple.

“It’s a home.”

At that point, the atmosphere in the church service dramatically changed. Instead of horror being recounted over and over, there was hope that was being delivered in large doses.

Don began to tell what a difference a home–a family–makes in the lives of these vulnerable, often invisible children. They told of the tangible difference the home they started made for children—children with names and beautiful faces. These are the stories, the smiling faces that changed my life. They were stories of hope, transformation, and restoration. It is God’s story, a story told and repeated in the bible. A story God wants to write in each of our lives – the story of God doing extraordinary things through ordinary people.

“It’s a home.”

For days after that church service I prayed, “Cambodia?”

“You want me to go to Cambodia, Lord?”

I really didn’t think, with our current financial and emotional situation, my husband was going to agree to that. So I wrote the biggest donation check that would clear our bank account to the Brewster’s non-profit, thinking that was all God was asking me to do.

Still, I cried for weeks.

I cried for the children being sold to strangers by the parents that were supposed to love and protect them.

I cried as if they were my own daughters.

When I confided to a friend that I thought I was going crazy with grief for children I had never met, children that felt like my own, she told me that she believed Jesus was letting me feel what he feels for these precious little ones.

“It’s unbearable,” I sobbed. Eventually I had a fight with God over this whole hideous issue of selling children for sex. “You could make this stop. You could take it off the table,” I angrily shouted. I felt His whispered response to my heart… “What age would that be? Five years old? Ten? Is it okay for a fifteen year old to be tortured, raped and sold for sex? A twenty-five year old?”

I could see this arguing with God was going nowhere so I shouted from the depths of my soul, “JUST DO SOMETHING!”

Before I had time to take a breath, He said to me, “Why don’t you?” That was a holy moment. Time stood still…

“It’s a home.”

“These are your daughters, the daughters you have longed for … find them.”

As the weeks and months of 2007 came and went, I continued to be brokenhearted for children I had never met. Though I daily battled my family’s difficult financial situation, the desire to do something for these kids acclerated in my spirit.

During the beginning of 2008, I sought direction, answers and wisdom from the place all God-fearing people go … Google! I began researching the words “sex trafficking” and “human trafficking” expecting to see details of this horrific crime in countries I had never visited. I was shocked to the core of my being when the words appeared on my screen… Sacramento, Sacramento, Sacramento.

My home? My city?

Through my research, I learned children were being sold for sex right in my own backyard – in my city, my state and in my country! While the reality of children being sold in Cambodia broke my heart, the news that they were being sold in my own backyard outraged me and propelled me into action. I then knew what God wanted me to do: build a home, a home for children rescued from sex trafficking.

Courage House.

It’s a home.

A home in my city and in every city around the world where there is none for these vulnerable children. It sounded so simple.

Two years later in 2010, this simple dream became a reality when Courage To Be You, Inc.

It has been encouraging and awe-inspiring to observe all God has done and is doing through volunteers and donors at C2BU. Our business model called for an army of volunteers to shoulder the day-to-day execution of all the tasks involved in carrying out the mission of C2BU and the dream of building Courage Houses until the day merchandise sales, training fees, government grants, and Courage Cafe’ profits can cover C2BU’s administrative overhead.

Our desire and corporate mandate is to be able to say to all who donate to C2BU – whether five dollars or five hundred thousand dollars – that every penny given goes directly to the programs and services C2BU offers in its mission to equip, encourage and empower individuals to be and do all God created them for … especially the vulnerable children rescued from sex trafficking.

When you reflect over all that God has done at C2BU through August 2011, it is mind boggling that it was all done with 90% volunteer hours and only 10% part-time paid staff. Up until August, 2011, there were no full-time salaried staff members and no corporate offices. To date, C2BU has over 2500 people who have believed in and at one time or another over the past three years have financially supported the dream of building homes for children rescued out of sex trafficking. In addition, there has been over 100,000 dollars donated in professional services and materials!

We also have over 3800 supporters who receive our monthly enews publication and over 11300 followers of C2BU on the Facebook Cause Page. I truly appreciate the sacrifice and efforts of each and every person who not only believed in this dream but offered their time, talents and treasure to see it become a reality.

I’ve told you the story of the past. We have reviewed the present. With two of our Courage Houses open as of August 1, 2011 (Courage House NorCal and Courage House Tanzania), I am thrilled to look to the future…

This is the word the Lord has pressed upon my heart: Fulfillment. He confirmed it with these words: “Blessed is she who believed, for there will be fulfillment of those things which were told to her from the Lord.” Luke 1:45 (NKJV)

The Lord promised homes for children rescued from sex trafficking and we at C2BU believe He will fulfill that promise. In light of that belief, we are planning:

These dreams are big, bold and—we believe—God-inspired. Courage To Be You, Inc. is looking for partners who share the same passion to equip, encourage and empower individuals to discover their purpose on this planet, especially the marginalized in our society.

We are looking for people to pray with us, serve with us, and give with us. We understand that whether you partner with us by donating your time, your talents, or your money, you are looking for a measurable return on your investment. While Return on Investment (ROI) is historically calculated and discussed in dollars and cents, Courage To Be You, Inc. is offering a different type of ROI – we are offering you the opportunity to make a difference in an individual’s life, thus changing a family, a community, a city, a state … and by the power of God, the world.

We believe that collectively we are able to do more than we dare imagine individually.
Last year, we heard many young women implore us… believe in me. We are believing. We are calling them family. Won’t you join us?

-Jenny Williamson, Founder and President, Courage To Be You, Inc.

Jenny Williamson, founder of Courage to Be You, Inc. and acting CEO, is a professionally-trained life coach, former Women’s Ministry Director, conference speaker, workshop leader, business owner, wife, mother, and passionate cheerleader of those wanting to embark on a journey of purpose and passion. Jenny believes that discovering and fulfilling one’s unique, God-given purpose is the adventure of a lifetime!

Jenny’s own life was forever changed when God branded the very personal and profound question upon her heart…Do you have the courage to be you, the you I created? Scared to death, but with all the courage she could muster, Jenny began this journey of discovering that before time began, she was created on purpose for a purpose. Now intentionally running like crazy toward everything God has planned for her, she equips and encourages others to become all God created them to be–nothing more, but absolutely refusing to let them settle for anything less.

Jenny no longer accepts one-on-one coaching clients, but devotes her time to speaking to groups or leading Courage Conferences. To contact Jenny regarding a speaking engagement or bringing a Courage Conference to your area, email info@c2bu.org.

Awards:

2010 Director’s Community Leadership Awards

Sacramento County District Attorney’s Community Spirit Award for 2011

Lungren Recognizes Community Leader for Her Efforts to Help Victims of Human Trafficking

As a professionally trained life coach and CEO of Courage to Be You, Inc. Jenny is known for her energetic and encouraging messages. Her workshops and conferences are engaging and powerful, and her call to action is inspiring. Driven by the desire to see all people encouraged, empowered, and equipped to live out the purpose for their lives, Jenny’s passion shows through her speaking. Her candid, humor-filled approach is relevant and life-impacting. Jenny believes that discovering and fulfilling one’s unique, God-given purpose is the adventure of a lifetime. To join her in this adventure and request her as a speaker, please contact info@c2bu.org.
View Jenny speaking at Simpson University here.

Upcoming Speaking Dates:

• Sierra Bible Church, Truckee, CA ~ May 20
• Impact Community Church Men’s Retreat, Elk Grove, CA  ~ June 2
• Crossroads Church, Natomas, CA  ~ June 16
  
• San Quentin Men’s Prison ~ June 30th
• CHIC2012, workshop leader ~  July 16-20
• Keynote Speaker – Women’s Conference Hosted by Assemblywoman Beth Gaines ~ September 15
• Sex Trafficking Summit ~ February 2013

“Jenny has a way of sifting through the noise or confusion associated with feelings to identify one’s priorities and values. She is a great listener that helps boil priorities down into a specific action plan. She does this in her own life and encourages you to do the same regardless of the external pressure or noise to do something else.” -Lynne

“Jenny is a gifted advocate, seeing things in people that they don’t see in themselves. She is inspiring and can kick people in the rear to get them moving. She is creative and encouraging.” -Kelli

“Jenny is infectious, motivating, and encouraging. She offers a lot of good insight and wisdom during our time together.” -Andy & LaQuela“Thank you Jenny for being so open – you absolutely touched my heart. Words can’t express it.”

“I was blessed and inspired by Jenny’s message.”

“Jenny is awesome! Her honesty touched my heart to change.”

“Jenny was fantastic, and her message spoke to me. I need to be more intentional about finding out God’s plan for me.”

“This is exactly what I’ve been praying about. How God can use me.”

“This was so awesome. I expect this will change my life.”

“Enjoyed Jenny very much. She really made an impact with me.”