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Cay Gibson
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| Posted: July 27 2005 at 3:22pm | IP Logged
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I didn't see a thread concerning pro-life work done in the church parish (my apologies if one already exists).
I thought we could share what goes on in our church parish regarding support for life.
My dh and I are the pro-life chaircouple for our church parish and the KC council. I don't have as much time to devote to this as I'd like but I do what I can and hope that God blesses the work.
I find it helps to have a yearly plan:
(January) Pro-Life March & Rosary held on anniv. of Roe v. Wade from church to KC Hall (approx. a 30 minute walk) for gumbo and fellowship...KC's cook the meal...baby items are collected and delivered to New Life Counseling (the crisis pregnancy center in our town)
(June) Pro-Life Baby Shower & Meal at KC Hall
(December) A Giving Tree is set up in the church foyer every advent...one weekend of Advent we collect baby shower items and in January we send it to NLC
I also write a pro-life corner for our church bulletin and we do meals for new moms.
One day I'd like to focus on the pro-life aspect of aging, but for now I'm in the middle of caring for life (young and old) in my home and that's where I'm at right now.
__________________
Cay Gibson
"There are 49 states, then there is Louisiana." ~ Chef Emeril
wife to Mark '86
mom to 5
Cajun Cottage Under the Oaks
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momwise
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| Posted: July 28 2005 at 9:27am | IP Logged
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Hi Cay!!
We moved to a new parish just under a year ago (wow, can it possibly be almost a year already?  ).
Both my old and new pro-life committees have sponsered some sort of poster and/or essay contests for the school and CCD.
In our old parish, this is a rather involved, formal process with special judges from outside the parish, an awards Mass and a very well thought out but cumbersome judging process. Volunteers go in to each class at the beginning of the contest to explain what kind of message is expected (you wouldn't believe some of the themes that come back on the posters if it is left to some of the teachers!).
The topics allowed last year were: God's gift of the Unborn Child, God's gift of the Elderly, and God's gift of the Disabled.
At the new church, the kids just turned in their entries, the committee took them home and judged them and the prizes were given out.
Either way the contest seems to bring out lots of excellent expressions of pro-life ideas. It is a very good thing for some of the older folks (who are partially anti-abortion at best) to see just under 100 very pro-life posters by young people hanging around the room for several weeks.
Also, the former parish has a huge bake sale in Jan. and sends the money to pro-life groups and crisis pregnancy centers. Our new parish doesn't have fund raising by individual groups.
Both churches have a big baby shower in May for the pregnancy centers. We tried to keep Baby Bundles (layettes with diapers and wipes) for immigrant families who came to our rectory.
There are a few other things we tried but didn't keep up such as Roses for Life (memorial roses on the altar each Sunday through the year).
And we always tried to keep up with the bishops' postcard campaigns and local petition drives at both places.
I love the new meals for moms idea and that's an apostolate I'd like to eventually organize.
__________________
Gwen...wife for 30 years, mom of 7, grandma of 3.....
"If you want equal justice for all and true freedom and lasting peace, then America, defend life." JPII
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Cay Gibson
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Joined: July 16 2005
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| Posted: July 28 2005 at 9:56am | IP Logged
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momwise wrote:
| Both my old and new pro-life committees have sponsered some sort of poster and/or essay contests for the school and CCD. |
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We did the oral essay contest about 3 years in a row but it was very time consuming (publicity, talking to CCD classes, mailouts, finding judges, etc.)and not much participation so we stopped doing it. It's a very good project but we live in a generation of non-writers  and there wasn't much interest.
momwise wrote:
| It is a very good thing for some of the older folks (who are partially anti-abortion at best) to see just under 100 very pro-life posters by young people hanging around the room for several weeks. |
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Now a poster contest sounds like an excellent idea. 
momwise wrote:
| There are a few other things we tried but didn't keep up such as Roses for Life (memorial roses on the altar each Sunday through the year). |
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I forgot the roses! Several, several years ago---before the birth of our firstborn---my dh found a local florist who would donate free roses to the mothers of baptized babies at our church. My dh handed out the roses for years then other KC members took over. Since my dh and I don't hand them out anylonger I'd almost forgotten about that. But the project still exists and the roses are still donated by the same pro-life florist. 
momwise wrote:
| And we always tried to keep up with the bishops' postcard campaigns and local petition drives at both places. |
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We've been sadly negligent in this area. One can only do so much.  But when I receive emails about upcoming votes on issues, I'm very good about clicking the send button to let my local hs group know to call their representatives.
__________________
Cay Gibson
"There are 49 states, then there is Louisiana." ~ Chef Emeril
wife to Mark '86
mom to 5
Cajun Cottage Under the Oaks
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Kelly
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| Posted: July 29 2005 at 8:07am | IP Logged
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I really like the posters idea!
Every year our homeschool group (which meets at the parish, but draws students from many parishes) has a Lenten Read-a-Thon to benefit our local crisis pregnancy center. Every year we get better at streamlining it. This year was our seventh year and we raised over $7000 just within our homeschool group (in 40 days, not bad for a bunch of little kids, eh?). Ironically, we took the idea to the local parochial school, which is MUCH bigger than our little hs group, and they raised a mere $3000. Still, it DOES get the word out to all the children and the kids are into it. It has also, coincidentally, been the "hook" that has grabbed many a reluctant reader. We make a big deal about it being money to benefit babies, and how every child is a winner, and their efforts are saving babies while performing a corporate work of mercy. Often, we have a representative from the Pregnancy Clinic there to accept the checks.
I took this idea from the Northern Virginia Torch crowd when we moved from NOVA to Florida. It has been a huge help to the clinic, and a blessing to the children.
Kelly in FL
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momwise
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| Posted: July 29 2005 at 8:17am | IP Logged
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Kelly wrote:
| This year was our seventh year and we raised over $7000 just within our homeschool group (in 40 days, |
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Wow!! Kelly, I'd love it if you'd post your organizational outline for this event. It sounds like something that could catch on!
__________________
Gwen...wife for 30 years, mom of 7, grandma of 3.....
"If you want equal justice for all and true freedom and lasting peace, then America, defend life." JPII
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Kelly
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| Posted: July 29 2005 at 7:47pm | IP Logged
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It's really pretty simple...not lots of organization involved. We start motivating the kids about a month before Lent begins. We made up and distribute forms that explain the event, basically that the kids have all of Lent to read and get pledges for their reading (either a per page pledge or a pay-upon-completion pledge). They can get pledges before or during the Read-a-thon, too, but they can't start READING their declared amount of pages until Ash Wednesday. They then have Lent to accomplish their desired amount of reading to secure their pledges.
We divide the readers into three groups: up to age 7, ages 8 to 11, and 12 and up. This is one of the few competitions where the little kids actually have the ADVANTAGE because the grand prizes in each category go to the child who raises the most money. Here are the prizes (and they ARE motivating!): $25 and a trophy to the top fund-raiser in each category; $15 and a big pretty ribbon to the second-place fund-raiser in each category; a trophy alone to the child in each category who reads the most pages. Because our number of participants is small (only about 20 to 30 in the homeschool group), we also give an Honorable Mention ribbon to each participant and $5. So, the competition costs us a little, but we raise so much awareness, and so much money for the clinic, it is well worth it.
We give the participants about 3 weeks to a month to collect their pledges at the end of the Read-a-Thon (tho there are always straglers, but it works out fine). A couple of years ago we started to mark this three/four week deadline for pledges by having an Icecream Social for all the participants---another good motivator! At the end of the school year party, we hand out the much-awaited trophies.
The hardest part of the Read-A-Thon is simply tallying up the numbers. We really have to rely on the children/mothers to give us the tally at the end in a timely fashion. If they don't get the numbers in, we can't chase them down. Still, it's always a little chaotic the day of the trophies, with people handing in their last minute totals (that they hadn't collected or added up until then). Other than that, there isn't much to be done in the way of organization (other than ordering the trophies a couple of weeks before the end-of-year party. And as for the chaos, we just offer it up as part of our Lenten sacrifice!
Kelly in FL
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rm4mrfrus
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| Posted: Nov 30 2006 at 9:42pm | IP Logged
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I am bumping this thread as we are gearing up for going to the March for Life. Does anyone have any sample bulletin announcements that I can look at? We got the go ahead today from our priest to try to organize a trip for our parish. In years past we just tagged along with a parish 45 minutes away. It was low key and not well attended....just a sprinkling of people from our parish.
This year we hope that by getting the word out there early and having the convenience of a bus picking us up in the church parking lot that we can generate more excitement and interest in going. We want to make it a big event. One of the things we hope to do is be able to not charge to ride the bus. In some years the cost has been prohibitive to our family going and we don't want that to be an issue. So our 3 month old Sanctity of Life Committee has already raised about $400 (from a bake sale and Advent wreath sales) to put towards the bus. We also hope to encourage people who support the March but can't go to donate $ towards sponsoring someone else to go.
Our priest said to start advertising in the bulletin next week. So now I'm looking for tips from those who have BTDT.....is it better to do a sign up sheet for those who are interested in going or to have them call? What would be a nice way to say that we hope to get donations to cover the cost of the bus but that we don't want to charge a set rate per person? Should we get the $ well in advance or wait til very close to the date?
We have a couple of college campuses nearby and would like to include them as well....any suggestions for them?
Dh and I volunteered a few months ago to cochair this brand new committee and I like coming up with ideas and suggestions but don't have much experience in the organizational side of committees. Anything we do here is a new experience since they have never had a prolife committee before...I like to see how others have done things. It helps me visualize how to do it here...
Now to respond to Cay's suggestion to share what we have done within our parish...
We had our first committee meeting in Sept. We had 7 other people show up besides dh and I. Dh and I had come up with a whole list of ideas that we thought we'd like to try (I had gotten some super ideas here when I asked) We had prepared a handout of pertinent sections of the CCC that explained the sanctity of life and related issues, chose Our Lady of Guadalupe and Mother Teresa as our patronesses, and brainstormed more ideas and activities. Dh met with Fr. to go over it all and he approved most all of our ideas. (a few he wanted to think more about or had reservations...like we wanted to make a couple of PG Mom parking spots but parking is an issue so he was not crazy about that one...and we also asked about adding the Prayer to St. Michael after Mass was over and he wasn't crazy about that either)
In Oct we started a birthday ministry (we call each person in the parish on his/her birthday and sing happy birthday and wish them a happy birthday from their parish family. We hope to have 31 different volunteers and each one take one day a month but so far only have about 5 volunteers so our family takes all the rest of the days...it is a lot of fun though and people seem to really like it!) It is not a serious activity but it does help reinforce the gift of each birth. Our ds just turned 3 last week and we had nobody to take his day and I was trying to think of someone to ask to call so that he could be on the receiving end of it....well I ended up not needing to because while we were getting in the car after daily Mass our priest and the office staff went in and called and left it on our answering machine! We were so touched that they would do that! They even asked one of the others who was at Mass to chat with us so that we didn't come back in when they were doing it!
We are also sponsoring the coffee and donuts socials every Sunday. We have a basket out for donations and each week we get just enough to cover that next week! Again this is not a serious thing, but we are finding that it is helping the families to get to know each other as their kids eat donuts and drink juice.
We also started a Rose and Rosary Program- Now when a child is baptized he/she gets a rose (which a local flower shop has been generous enough to donate) and a KoC Rosary (black for boys and ivory for girls). So far we have had 4 baptisms and it has been well received.
We also had prolife info in the bulletin during the month of Oct and also Post abortion help numbers and also pregnancy help numbers (these things are not in the bulletin anymore so we need to see if we can have a small section of the bulletin for prolife things each week. I think the numbers need to be in the bulletin all the time too)
Our best thing though is that we were able to add 2 hours of silent adoration to our parish's monthly Adoration. It used to only be an hour at the most...now it is closer to 3!
We have also decided to "start" a Pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The KoC and the Ladies club have agreed to split the cost of it so we will be ordering Her sometime this week. We hope to increase parish devotion to the Blessed Mother and to Prolife work. We still have to work out the procedure and such but hope to begin soon!
Some things that we have in the works....adding prolife prayers to the Prayers of the Faithful. We sent the info to Fr. and think this will start this weekend......spiritual adoption of a baby. We ordered the most beautiful prayer cards with OLG on them and Fulton Sheen's prayer on the back. We plan to start this the weekend of Jan 20....we hope to have some speakers come to help raise awareness of prolife issues. Some speakers we would like to get would be Jason Evert (who is pretty costly), Janet Smith (who is also pretty pricey) and Fr. Richard Hogan (who we don't know yet how expensive he would be)... We don't know who to try for yet but Fr. would really lik Jason Evert! How far would those of you in Va come to hear those speakers? And would you be willing to make a donation to help cover their costs?
I also just found out about the National Night of Prayer on Dec.8-9 and would like to do this next year. We also got info on starting up a Life Chain (for Oct) and hope to start one in our town next Oct also. It seems that I find out about things too close to the actual event to do a good job this year planning it, but we are putting it on the agenda for next year.
Anyway, those are the things we have done or hope to do. I'd love to see what others are doing....
__________________
Hollee married to dh in 94,
ds(96), dd(97), ds(00), ds(02), ds(03) and dd(05)
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4Real Forums : Domestic Church
Topic: Pro-Life Work
