Australian Card Project Raises $1106 for Projects in Brazil and Guatemala

Posted November 1, 2014

We thank our Australian friends for making a successful fund raiser down under a success in North America! Young adults at the Bend, Oregon Feast Tabernacles site were able to raise $1106 for LifeNets supported Youth Corps projects in Brazil and Guatemala.

Alexander Love from Australia has been studying here and arranged for the fund raiser in Bend from October 9-17, 2014.

Alexander writes:

"As you know Keith Lippincott coordinated the Youth Card Project in Bend. We had 600 cards printed for sale and sold approximately 530 of them. After deducting expenses, the total amount that was raised from this one Feast site is $1106.43! An awesome result."

The Australian team young adults consists of Samantha Thomson, Alex Love and Rohan John. They are members of Melbourne, Australia UCG.

The proposal was that one festival site in the USA would be selected to conduct a pilot in 2014. Australia would provide the artwork, but printing and promotion would all be handled by a team of young people who will be attending the selected festival site.

We hope to extend this to more US sites for 2015.

Elder Bill Eddington wrote to us earlier in July with the following:

"A couple of years ago I had an email conversation with Vic about a LifeNets greeting card program introduced in Australia. I sent him some sample cards.

It works this way - children and adults throughout the country send in designs and the most suitable are printed in quantity on greeting cards for sale, with envelopes, at our Feast sites. The program was initiated by, and has been run for the last four years by church teenagers and young adults. The program generates wide interest and contributions throughout the UCG community. It has been very successful and, for the many people who send greeting cards during the Feast, very economical.

One of the program coordinators, Alex Love, is in the USA at present and will be at Summer Camps in California, Oregon and in Wyoming. After the camps, Alex will be studying in Vancouver for the remainder of the year. He has suggested that if there is interest, he could work with someone in the USA to conduct a pilot program at one of the UCG festival sites. He already has contacts with people who could run the pilot. Because of time constraints, the card designs this year would have to come from Australia but be printed in the US.

Alexander Love describes the Youth Card Project:

"The Card Project has been a huge success back home in Australia, as I’m sure you realise. It has happened at three consecutive Feasts now. In 2011 Samantha Thomson (21 years at the time) from Melbourne conceived and managed the project with the assistance of a small group of friends. The following year I took over and organised it, and after that we passed it on to Shannon Clark (18 years) and now Rohan John (17 years). Since my year managing the project I have kind of ‘overseen’ the project by providing the resources and assistance that Shannon and Rohan have needed.

"Right from the start, we said that as well as raising funds, an important part of the project is providing a way for young people in the church to be involved in good works, and creating more connections among brethren, especially young people. This is why we have had a different person ‘in charge’ each year, why we tend to seek youth and young adults to manage the project and assist at the various FoT sites, why we have had specific projects where the funds we have raised have been directed, and why we source designs for the cards from all church members. In 2011 a four young adults, including Samantha and myself, went to the UYC camp in Kenya and visited many church areas, and since then the finds have been directed at projects that we have been informed of, but that we also know of from our trip (such as the LifeNets academy in Migori and roof of a church building in Western Kenya). This may change though as the scope/scale of the project changes."