Develop People. Strengthen Communities.

Overview

Global Outreach Developments was established in Azusa, California, in 1996 through community service alongside fellow college students, and incorporated in 1999 out of a conviction Gregg had formed on a Kenya trip the year before: statements of care mean little without action behind them, and action without local capacity does not last.

Garner has said he watched enough well-intentioned projects fail as soon as the visiting team left the country to conclude that basic project implementation was the easier problem to solve. The harder problem and the one that would sustain whatever was built, including infrastructure, was building people who could run, repair, and extend what had been built after the visitors went home. That distinction, between finishing a project and developing someone able to sustain one, is why the organization is called Global Outreach Developments, plural: not developments the way a builder finishes a subdivision, but developing people, an ongoing process where the one who helps and the ones who are helped develop together.

Nonprofit incorporation and federal tax exemption happened in 1999, the same year Gregg married Tara, who had been involved in the work from its first year and became a founding member of the organization. The two of them, along with Robert Muñoz and Jason Roufs, formed the core of what participants at the time called the A-Team, running recurring service projects in the Azusa area and small trips to Mexico and Kenya through the late 1990s.

In 2000 Gregg and Tara relocated the organization's base to Nashville, arriving with no local contacts and, for a stretch, dwindling financial support. Garner taught Bible and math at a local high school while Tara looked for social-work opportunities and the organization reestablished itself around them. The teaching job mattered beyond the paycheck: it shaped how Garner thought about education, and that thinking later contributed to the model behind the schools he founded.

A REPEATABLE RHYTHM

What distinguished Global Outreach Developments from just a series of mission trips run by volunteers was the rhythm it developed. By 2005, a year Garner has called one of the organization's most defining, the annual calendar moved through winter trips to Mexico, spring service projects in Appalachian communities, a summer internship program, and academic semesters at the Institute, all threaded together by touring and recording with UnNamed Servant, whose concerts introduced the organization to a national audience of young people.

A participant might first encounter the work at a concert, attend a SLAM youth event, join a summer internship, enroll at the Institute, and eventually take on staff responsibility for the program that had first brought them in.

Garner has described this as one of the organization's central discoveries: that formation and responsibility reinforce each other more effectively across repeated cycles than through any single intensive experience.

The summer internship, which began with roughly a dozen participants in 2002, became the most visible expression of that rhythm. It combined study, community service, international travel, and increasing independence; an advanced tier called Immersion, introduced in 2006, placed returning participants in unfamiliar settings with minimal facilitation, requiring them to exercise judgment the earlier internship had only modeled for them. A second Immersion level gave the most experienced participants latitude to define and carry out their own projects rather than execute ones designed for them. Hundreds of young people moved through the program over two decades, and Garner has said its clearest measure of success was how often participants either moved into similar service on their own, or returned as staff, capable of running the very structures that they had once participated under.

By 2008, seven consecutive summers of the same internship format had taught the organization as much about its own limits as about its participants. Garner concluded that the format, effective as it was, consumed enough staff time and attention that it was crowding out the organization's capacity to build the other aspects of the organization. Beginning in 2009, the summer internship gave way for roughly three years to a shorter program called Da' Mission, built less around a single intensive two-month summer and more around a 3-week intensive, focusing on questions of vocation and purpose that oriented participants toward the possibility of sustained, rather than seasonal, work abroad.

That reorientation surfaced an opportunity to confront a problem the organization was now ready to start resolving. Participants who wanted to live and work for extended periods in partner communities around the world still had to support themselves, often while living alongside families with far fewer resources than they had.

Garner has recalled the organization trying, without complete success, to avoid a model in which its own representatives simply became one more household in a partner community permanently dependent on support raised back home. That unresolved tension, more than any single strategic plan, is part of what later pushed Garner toward building businesses capable of generating income and skill sets that were independent of donor support, a shift documented on this site's Entrepreneurship page.

Although the full vision was never realized, the experience deepened the organization's understanding of why job creation was fundamental to both community and even human development.

The organization also built a recurring rhythm of annual program themes, drawn from scripture and carried across internship curricula, music, and teaching materials, that gave successive cohorts of participants a shared vocabulary even as the specific people in the room changed year to year. The themes are preserved in the organization's own records rather than reproduced here in full, but they functioned as a kind of institutional memory, letting a participant who joined in a later cycle encounter questions earlier cohorts had already wrestled with, in a different historical moment. The theme cycle repeated every ten years; under Garner's leadership the organization completed two and a half full cycles, ending with the NuNation theme in 2025.

GEOGRAPHIC REACH

Programs and partnerships extended into Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, El Salvador, England, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, alongside sustained work across more than a dozen U.S. states. Within India, the organization's work reached Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Kolkata, Orissa, and Mumbai, a spread of cities and regions too varied in language, religion, and economy to treat as a single program transplanted from place to place.

Garner has noted that the diversity forced participants to abandon any assumption that a model built in Nashville could simply be exported without effective contextualization.

Over almost three decades, the organization's continuing presence took shape around five regional bases: Nashville, Tennessee; Palo and Tacloban in Leyte, in the Philippines, serving Southeast Asia; Sitio Nuevo, El Salvador, serving Latin America; Gurugram, in the Indian state of Haryana; and the Bombo Town area, Uganda, serving East Africa.

Garner articulated a governing rule for how the Nashville base and the international campuses were meant to relate to each other: "What we do here is what we do there." The organization, in his account, was not to introduce programs abroad that it had not first tested, sustained, or learned from at home.

A summer program for Nashville children was expected to inform, not simply be exported as, a summer program for children in a partner community; a housing initiative in Nashville's Hopewell neighborhood was expected to inform, not dictate, a housing conversation in a partner country. The principle ran in both directions: partner communities were also expected to inform practice in Nashville, not merely receive it.

Public health was one recurring thread within that international programming: a program led by Robert Muñoz and advanced through childbirth and maternal health education by his wife, Heather Muñoz, and by Tara Garner.

A 2005 NuNation Summer Internship team traveling in rural Kenya, which included Gregg, Tara, Robert, and Heather, arrived prepared to run community education alongside public health programming, only to find that communities of need expected the visiting team to bring physicians, medical supplies, and the capacity to perform procedures they did not have.

Garner has described the gap between what the team could offer and what the community had been led to expect as both a miraculous time of community care and one of the more sobering lessons of the organization's early international work, one that sharpened, rather than settled, its thinking about the difference between short-term resolutions and long-term capacity building for community self-sustainability.

A CAMPUS AND A NEIGHBORHOOD

Community development was not confined to travel, nor was it meant to be: the same philosophy that discouraged development workers from experimenting on destination communities of need abroad applied equally at home.

When the organization's Nashville lease neared expiration in late 2008, it purchased a former school property in Hopewell, an economically disinvested neighborhood on the edge of Nashville, and completed a forty-day renovation, documented in a short film called 40 Days, in time to open the next academic semester on schedule.

The purchase closed during the 2008 financial crisis, a period during which several young families connected to the organization were able to buy homes in the neighborhood at prices depressed by the same downturn that was displacing homeowners elsewhere in the country.

The organization then built a sustained neighborhood-development program in Hopewell running roughly from 2008 through 2011, called “The Hopewell Project”: after-school programming, summer camps, food distribution, services for elderly residents and widows, housing repair, and a community garden led by gardener Seth Davis that prioritized produce distribution to widows in the neighborhood. Seth's leadership turned fallow land into a steady source of fresh produce for the neighborhood.

A standing weekly commitment, called Community Development Day, sent students and staff into the neighborhood as a matter of institutional routine rather than occasional volunteerism, making local development as much a part of the academic calendar as any course.