WELCA Backpack Drive
Throughout August and September, our Women of the ELCA (WELCA) group collected donations for school kits for Lutheran World Relief. On Sunday, September 18, the completed kits were blessed, and on Tuesday, September 20, a group of OSLC women travelled to New Windsor, Maryland to drop the kits off at LWR.
We filled all 40 backpacks and had supplies left over!! Those extra supplies will be donated to Stonehouse Elementary School for local needs. We thank WELCA for organizing, collecting, and delivering for the backpack drive. THANK YOU for all of your support of our drive!! We are so grateful for the ways that we are Christ's Body for the sake of the world!
If you're interested in helping out with these kinds of projects, join WELCA or our Social Ministry Committee. The next Lydia Circle (WELCA) meeting is on Oct. 11 at 7pm - a reminder: all ELCA women are members of WELCA! The next Social Ministry Committee meeting will be Nov. 14 at 7pm.
A little more about LWR & why we support their work:
LWR was founded by Lutherans in the United States at the end of WWII because the war left roughly 1/5th of the world's Lutherans homeless. Today, LWR aims to tackle global poverty, providing aid in emergencies and by partnering with communities for longer-term work to help people build self-sufficiency and community-owned approaches to break the cycle of poverty. More information about LWR can be found on their website: www.lwr.org. Their mission is simple: Affirming God’s love for all people, we work with Lutherans and partners around the world to end poverty, injustice and human suffering.
Each year, LWR collects a number of types of kits (personal care kits, baby care kits, school kits, and fabric kits) as well as quilts to send to communities in need around the world. These kits end up in places like Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Guatemala that experience chronic and generational poverty, and in places that have need due to emergencies and conflicts in their countries, like Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan. (And places that experience both, like Haiti)
By supporting the work of LWR, we are able to make an impact with other churches and organizations to help fight poverty across the globe. We're called to serve locally, of course, but God also calls us to serve our neighbors in need in other parts of the world. While alone we may not be able to make much of a difference, by joining together with other congregations and organizations, we can make a huge difference.
