The Quaker Kids of Newtown Quaker Meeting recently held their annual lasagna dinner for charity at the historic Quaker Meetinghouse and raised a whopping $4,008 for their designated charity, Right Sharing of World Resources (RSWR)!
RSWR is a small Quaker organization currently working in India, Kenya, Guatemala, and Sierra Leone providing small grants to groups of impoverished women who then make micro-loans to their members to engage in start-up, income generating activities in agriculture and small-scale business, through community self-help.
The payback rate of the loans in the RSWR program is an impressive 95%!
Each group then uses the repaid loans to make more loans to other women to fund more businesses.
The adults of Newtown Quaker Meeting have agreed to bring the children’s total for RSWR to $6,500 to enable them to “sponsor” a specific group of 20-30 women so the children can continue to be in touch with “their group,” receive regular reports, and learn about the businesses helped by their funds.
Newtown Meeting Quaker Kids have now raised over $40,000 distributed to charities of their choice during the past 14 years by serving simple meals for voluntary donations.
Cynthia Vandenberg of Trenton, NJ, head of the children’s Lasagna Dinner Committee, said, “The young people of our Meeting are just terrific! They work hard collecting funds and serving food to a crowd of people happy to have dinner with their friends for a good cause.”
Previous recipients of the funds raised at charitable events by the Newtown Quaker young people have been: Habitat for Humanity, Syrian refugee relief via the Shelterbox; US hurricane relief via the All Hands Volunteers; Valley Youth House’s Synergy Project for homeless youth in Bucks County and Allentown; Haiti Relief; The School for Leadership, Afghanistan (SOLA), the first boarding school for girls in Afghanistan; Greater Philadelphia Diaper Bank; Mercer Street Friends Center in Trenton, NJ; Penndel Food Pantry; Save Darfur; and Heifer International.
PHOTO CAP: Newtown Meeting Quaker Kids, from left, NaNa Courtney-Bacher, Devin Vandenberg, Nick Vandenberg, Avery Frank, Noah Buxton, Charlie Forte, Jack Ciccimaro, Lydia Ciccimaro, Meredith McDonald, and Wren Francisco.