If anyone says that young people today don't care, they have never met the youth at Spectacular, a camp of about 1,000 youth and staff held at Graceland University in rural Iowa. These youth and staff heard the calling of our impoverished brothers and sisters all over the world and responded in a BIG way...In just one week, they raised over $11,500 to support a community in Zambia! This community is working hard to build a water system that will provide clean water to its residents. (Read more about community development in Zambia.) The youth at Spectacular realized the need to work with these community members to make this possible. How inspiring!
Money was not the only thing raised this past week at Spectacular- the camp's awareness of poverty and its solutions also increased dramatically. The summer interns for Outreach International taught a class called Redefine [Poverty], where we discussed the deeper issues of poverty and then did something about it. Our classes did awareness-raising guerrilla-style campaigning all over campus. One of the coolest ideas that a student came up with was making invisible people out of packing tape and putting them in the cafeteria to demonstrate that poverty makes people invisible.
-Stephen Donahoe
Congratulations to everyone who was involved in this successful event. I'm amazed at how much money you raised!
Posted by: Matt Bolton | July 30, 2008 at 09:13 AM