An interesting way of fundraising, via Happy Catholic:
Good Counsel Homes, Inc. is a non-profit organization that serves pregnant women throughout the State of New Jersey and New York by providing much needed services including shelter, food, medical care, education, job skills, social skills, counseling, parenting, nutrition and computer classes. Good Counsel Homes currently has five homes and is in the process of opening a new home in South Jersey.
I am inviting you to sponsor the walkathon through your blog. Doing so is free and can be achieved by a simple post, but you are welcome to blog about it as much as you want. In fact, I am immensely excited to see the posts that this Blogathon may generate. If you agree, I will set up a web page assigned exclusively to your blog… Your blog name (however you wish it to appear) will be on our walkathon t-shirt.
Susan Brennan is organizing the May 31 walkathon and you can see more about it here. If you have a blog, you can pass the word and help raise this money for this project.
My Patient Husband and I volunteered together at Birthright when we were still students and again when we were newly-married. Our local Birthright didn’t have the same reach that Good Counsel Homes seems to have, but the idea driving them was the same: don’t just tell moms not to abort, but make it possible for them to live complete lives while having their babies. Make available the resources, the support, the love, and the prayers they need for the tough job of being a single mom, quite possibly without any help from family or the baby’s father. Over time, they will possess the means to get out of poverty and flourish.
Will it be easy? No. But it seems that both organizations are striving to remove the adversarial tone from the argument. Instead of “baby OR mom” it can be “baby AND mom,” such that what benefits the one will benefit the other.
The website says they take clothing donations, so I’ll see whether they can use hand-knit items. (Who knows? There may be a mom there hungering for a beaded scarf and hat set.) But they can always use prayers, and that’s completely besides any monetary donations they receive.
Check out the Good Counsel Homes website and see what you think.