Pennies for Peace really added up
Boys and girls, teachers and friends recently participated in the Pennies for Peace campaign in the Southwest Vermont Supervisory Union schools.
Delta Kappa Gamma, ETA Chapter, Bennington, sponsored the Pennies for Peace project in our schools. Delta Kappa Gamma is a society of women educators, both working and retired, in the area. Pennies for Peace is a service learning project of the Central Asia Institute (CAI).
The CAI was founded in 1993 by Greg Mortenson, whose work is chronicled in the book “Three Cups of Tea: Ones Man’s Mission to Promote Peace and Build Nations … One School at a Time” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.
The primary goal of the institute is to build schools and educate children, especially girls, in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is said that if you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.
Becoming involved in Pennies for Peace enables us, and our children, to become aware of a people who struggle with poverty and illiteracy in a warring land. We become aware that one penny will buy a pencil to set a child on the road to literacy.
Our society has little value for the penny. It is often a throw away coin. All students can realize their capacity as philanthropists when pennies come together and grow and grow into a startling contribution.
That is exactly what happened in Bennington. For six weeks, the students in the SVSU, from kindergarten to grade 12, contributed pennies. They were collected each Friday and counted each Monday by ETA Chapter retired teachers at St. Peter Is Episcopal Church. Each Monday, the pennies went to the Bank of Bennington, and we were given a check payable to Pennies for Peace.
The final week of the campaign ended on Dec. 12. The penny count is complete and the grand total is ready to be announced. We are overjoyed and humbled to tell you that 196,326 pennies have built $1,963.26 to be contributed to Pennies for Peace.
It is Greg Mortenson’s hope and our hope “that Pennies for Peace will awaken a budding capacity in all children to see that they have the ability to understand differences and commonalities in the world, and to instill in them the belief that when problems arise they have the power to create solutions.”
CAROLEE GULLEY
ANN WHITE
Co-presidents
ETA Chapter
Bennington VT
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