Some of you have heard this idea from already, but if not, some of us have had the idea of not buying or receiving gifts for Christmas this year and instead giving the money we would have spent on presents to organizations that provide sustainable clean drinking water where there is currently no clean water. Wells can be built in Africa for 1-15 grand depending on the soil and other such stuff according to one websight I found. The dream is to start a group of us who will encourage as many people as possible to join with us in doing this. If we get 500 people to do this we could raise upwards of $100,000 grand. We plan on spreading the word through a websight, emails, blogs, word of mouth, student groups on various college campuses, the Ellen DeGeneres show, and any other way we can figure out. We figure our overhead costs will only be about a hundred dollars (the cost of a good websight for one year).
I plan on this being a positive campaign, which means everything about this will be about how we can raise money to help people in a very basic need of life and not about attacking the consumerism of Christmas, thought this very well may do that indirectly.
If you want to be a part of the team that organizes this, we will be having our first meeting in the Prince Student Union on the campus of MVNU on Saturday March 10th at 10 AM. Feel free to invite others that you know might want to be a part of this.
The end goal is simply to provide sustainable clean drinking water for as many people as we can. To do this we will most likely work through faith based groups and secular groups (I say that upfront so that there are no misunderstandings later). If you are going to come, try to do a bit of research and brings some organizations info with you to the meeting.
If you have any questions email me at peterkevinson@yahoo.com or call me at 740 392 3197.
Out tentative name for everything is water4christmas.
