The theme of this year’s event was ‘Restoring the Heart of Our Communities’

Leah Anaya
For Clark County Today

The annual Clark County Prayer Breakfast was held Thursday at the Hilton Vancouver Downtown, with this year’s theme being “Restoring the Heart of Our Communities.” Aptly, the keynote speaker was Kiev, Ukraine native Andrey Ivanov, who co-founded an organization in 2013 in Clark County called FlashLove. 

The purpose of FlashLove, Ivanov says, is “putting youth on a mission.” Volunteers work with the youth, training them in mentorship and with labor skills for community service projects and events.  

Some examples of these service projects done previously have been community clean ups, home projects for the elderly, school building maintenance, and holiday events. On some occasions, a large group of youth and their families show up to specified areas to clean up garbage from the street, sidewalk, and in people’s front yards, and knock on their doors to talk with them and assess the further needs of the neighborhood. Sometimes they clean up the side of a highway, picking up garbage, left behind items, needles, etc., and take it to the local dumps. They’ve assisted private schools with painting interior walls. They also cut, purchase, and deliver Christmas trees, and provide toys and holiday meals to families who otherwise couldn’t afford them. Most recently, they’ve helped with clean up efforts in the wake of the Nakia Creek Fire. 

Refocusing the attention of our youth into community support will not only give them a purpose that keeps them out of trouble, Ivanov said, but will also give hope back to community members who feel the chaos and division of the world ripping away the strong ties they once felt to their hometown. Ivanov said that while he saw the world turn its back on the youth of today as the rate of violent crime steadily rose, he asked himself, “What would our world look like if instead of condemning the bad behavior of so many kids, we poured love into them and set their hearts on a mission, much greater than themselves?”  

FlashLove does not represent or work out of a specific church, but rather the organization brings churches together, outside of a building and back into the community. 

“We want our youth to get to work fulfilling their mission in life, the mission given them by their Creator,” Ivanov said. 

With suicide being the third leading cause of death for children ages 10-14, rising fatherlessness in families, drugs and alcohol being marketed to children at alarming rates, and, of course, crime and record-setting inflation leaving many families unable to provide basic needs for their children, Ivanov said his vision is to train youth on how to deal with the ways of the world, teach them basic life skills that will help them thrive in life and in their families, and inspire them to assist other families with the model of community members taking care of each other for the good of all. 

Ivanov shared statistics and data during his presentation that gave pause to many audience members. For example, he discussed the Department of Defense (DOD) having conducted hundreds of studies specifically focusing on abhorrent male behavior. They wanted to understand, Ivanov said, “what sets the conditions leading to violence.” They looked at prison systems, which is where Ivanov said we “throw people away who are deemed unfit or unsafe.” The DOD has spent millions of dollars on grants to academic institutions, to find commonalities, and through a high-resolution MRI, it was discovered that 95 percent of prison inmates had some level of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), which is caused by a mother consuming alcohol during pregnancy. There is no amount of alcohol a woman can consume while pregnant that is guaranteed to be safe for her developing baby. 

“The question is not if there is damage,” Ivanov said, “but what gets damaged.”  

He shared medical images of the brains of developing fetuses that compared the normal brain to that of a baby who had been exposed to alcohol in utero. The difference was astounding. Ivanov quoted a study that showed two to five percent of society has some level of FAS, which sets the stage to feed 40,000 new prisoners into our prison system per year. 

“Youth with fetal alcohol syndrome,” Ivanov said, “are 19 times more likely to be dependent on the taxpayers than youth who are without. That is 19 to one. An estimated 5.1 percent of people will be confined in the prison system during their lifetime … It is estimated that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and folic acid deficiency is linked to 97 percent of all violent crime.” 

Ivanov pointed out that it takes 18 tax paying citizens to pay for every one person who is incarcerated. “I guarantee if we conducted brain scans [of school shooters], they would all be products of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. 

“All women of reproductive age should be getting 400mg of folic acid [per day]. I never thought I’d be talking about this topic, by the way. But I want to save this nation. Because this nation is my people.” 

As an arm of FlashLove, Andrey and his team started the Spartan Challenge, which is a quasi-bootcamp setting for young adults where they are taught life skills such as health and fitness, basic vehicle maintenance, self-defense, and more. When the kids graduate from the challenge, they begin participating in service events and leadership within FlashLove. There have been six challenge cycles, with the most recent class adding females into the training. FlashLove has also recently introduced a Timber Frame housing project meant to alleviate the homelessness crisis by empowering single mothers, veterans, elderly, and, of course, our youth, to move into a stable and affordable way of life by living in high quality tiny homes in sustainable micro farm communities. 

Jason Hattrick of the Kindness 911 organization was the Master of Ceremonies for the prayer breakfast. George Golden, founder of the nonprofit L.I.N.K.S., was the Honored Citizen of the event. Golden passed away in February of this year at the age of 78. His wife, April, and one of his daughters were present to accept the honor.