Filed under: The Orchard
Our friends over at Temple B’nai Israel in Aurora are starting their Spring Hebrew Courses on January 18th. Each class is taught on Sunday mornings from 7:25am – 9:25am and run for 12 weeks.
For more information, contact Gary Raymond.
Ok, so here’s how it worked:
We asked all of you – The Orchard Community – to buy and donate brand new toys.
The toys were then taken to Bardwell Elementary School on the east side of Aurora for an event called The Christmas Gift Mart which is an amazing event put on by our friends at Community Christian Church in Naperville.
Now the cool part….in case you don’t know…
The gifts weren’t donated to families in need. They were sold.
For $2 each.
Why? So that parents that would normally not be able to purchase gifts for their
children would be able to do so without simply receiving a “hand-out.”
And the really, really cool part?
The money raised by the sale of the gifts was poured back into partner schools in two communities.
And get this…. The same exact thing happened in Joliet as well as Aurora!
The results?
9,500 toys collected.
1,000+ volunteers.
3,500 community members blessed in Aurora & Joliet.
$11,500 raised for schools by the Aurora Gift Mart alone!
I’m telling you… This was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of!
And Orchard…..you guys are AMAZING! Thank you, thank you, thank you for the 800+ toys you donated and to all of you who were a part of serving at the Gift Mart event! What a beautiful way to celebrate the birth of our Savior.
Filed under: Orchard Kids
One great reason to work in Orchard Kids – the KIDS are FUNNIER than Scott! (sorry Scott)
Conversation between a volunteer and 4 year old child in an Orchard Kid’s class this weekend:
Volunteer: “Did you eat a lot of turkey on Thanksgiving?”
4 year old Boy: “What’s a turkey?
Volunteer: ‘Well, its a bird”
Boy: “I never eat birds.”
Posted by Kathryn Egly
The Orchard Blog 