Mormon Author Helps Foster Care Kids

Mormon Author Helps Foster Care Kids

Popular author Richard Paul Evans, who wrote The Christmas Box, Grace: A Novel,  Timepiece, The Letter, and The Five Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me About Life and Wealth, sponsors Christmas Box International.   Richard Paul Evans is a Latter-day Saint.  Christmas Box International is now associated with Operation Kids®.  Operation Kids sponsors the Christmas Box Lifestart Initiative with the motto, “Until every child is OK.”

Operation Kids has been around for a decade.  The organization supports charities that help secure the education, health, safety and well-being of kids.  Examples include the following:

• Improving Safety through The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s “Net Smartz” program.
• Improving Health through the life-changing and life-saving medical procedures of Operation Smile and the Children’s Organ Transplant Association.
• Improving Well-Being through Right To Play’s effective programs teaching conflict resolution through sport, in more than 23 countries.
• Improving Education in New Orleans through the Edible Schoolyard project, funding for summer science internships at New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School and programs for intellectually disabled children provided by Best Buddies.

The Christmas Box Initiative focuses on youth who are or who have been in foster care:

“Each year, more than 24,000 youths age out of the foster care system in America . These are teens that were never adopted, nor able to return to the homes from which they were removed due to abuse, neglect and abandonment. Many of these youth leave foster care as young as 18 years old. Without a family or support network, they face almost insurmountable challenges as they try to navigate the difficulties of adulthood, including incarceration, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, mental illness, poverty, homelessness and suicide. With the right resources, however, they have a much higher chance of success. 

“In October 2008, Operation Kids joined with Christmas Box International to help raise money for the Christmas Box Lifestart Initiative.  Each Lifestart kit provides youth aging out of the foster care system with important necessities including dinnerware, cooking utensils, first aid supplies, bedding, a tool kit, towels, information on local resources available to them, and much more.  As of December 31, 2008, more than $50,000 had been raised online for the Lifestart initiative, providing Lifestart kits for nearly 1,000 youth.  The funding also allows the program to grow to several new states in 2009.  Operation Kids will match every donation, dollar-for-dollar, contributed toward the Christmas Box Lifestart kits. (Read More.)

Local Mormons Provide Food Relief in Florida

On June 25, 2009, Florida Today.com, in an article by John A. Torres, reported the following:

Starting today, hungry families struggling to provide can go to the nearest Catholic Church for a week’s supply of food.

Rik Jesse, Florida Today

More than 12,000 pounds of food collected and donated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was picked up Wednesday by volunteers with Catholic Charities of Central Florida.  The partnership is expected to ease the economic crunch for struggling families for the next three weeks.  The food is available for anyone, regardless of faith.

It’s the first time an LDS Stake has connected with the local Catholic Church to work on this type of project.  There are a large number of Catholic Churches in Brevard County that can serve as distribution centers.  The project follows a successful fund-raising campaign called Project Hunger, aimed at providing food for the poor during the summer months.  Donations are typically lower during the summer than during the winter holiday season, so it’s difficult to keep food banks stocked.  This recent donation will help provide needed food until the Project Hunger funds are allocated.  Funding for the effort was provided by donations from Latter-day Saints (Mormons) throughout Central Florida.

To read the full article, click here.

The Journey of a Peach

The journey of a single peach through the hands of thousands of Latter-day Saint volunteers to the mouths of a hurricane-torn family is proof that through small and simple acts of service the Church can collectively accomplish something large.

Working at the cannery

LDS Church News published a story called “Behind the Box,” describing the unselfish service of thousands of Latter-day Saints (Church News, Sept 27, 2008).  Local members cared for peach trees on the Church-owned farm in Ogden, Utah.  The peaches were delivered to a Church cannery in Lindon, Utah, where they were cleaned and processed by additional volunteers.

The cans emerged from the Lindon cannery with a Deseret label, not for commercial distribution, but for the welfare needs of the Church, and for humanitarian aid efforts.  The canned peaches were transported to “Welfare Square” in Salt Lake City, where additional Mormon volunteers packed them into “food boxes.”  The food boxes were then shipped by truck to Texas.

In Texas, the food boxes were unloaded and distributed to hurricane victims in the greater Houston area.

“The Church has 138 storehouses located around the Western Hemisphere; 108 of those storehouses are in the United States and Canada and 128 are operated entirely by volunteers. Food items for the storehouses are produced at canneries and other facilities across the United States.

“Each year, 14 Church canneries produce 12.6 million cans of food. In addition, Deseret Bakery produces 453,594 loaves of bread, Deseret Pasta produces 938,505 pounds of pasta and Deseret Soap produces 2.6 million pounds of soap. Deseret Dairy produces 9.8 million pounds of milk, 1.5 million pounds of powdered milk and 727,251 pounds of cheese.

“The Deseret label represents compassion, hard work and high quality,” said Brother Lifferth. “It is the only brand that money can’t buy,” he said, noting that the products are not sold but distributed to the poor and needy and victims of disasters.”

Ward Relief Society Humanitarian Aid Project

The Women’s organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) is called the Relief Society.  Charity work is central to the organization, which is over 5 million strong.  Women meet together every Sunday as part of the typical sabbath block of meetings to learn about the Savior and principles of the gospel.  Four times each year, a ward (like a parish) will have an evening meeting for an enriching activity, and often these meetings are oriented towards performing humanitarian aid projects.  The North Mapleton Utah 8th Ward often sponsors welfare projects, and one was held on June 10, 2009 at the North Mapleton Stake Center in the cultural hall.  An area was designated for the assembling of quilts to be sent to disaster areas.  Tables were moved together end to end to create an assembly line to put together hygiene kits for disaster relief.  Refreshments were served, and the ladies enjoyed the cameraderie associated with such an events.  Such meetings and projects are ongoing in the Church on ward, stake, and all-church levels.

Church Helps Bring Water to African Communities

LUPUTA, Democratic Republic of the Congo 17 April 2009

Residents of the town of Luputa in Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo are celebrating the arrival of clean, fresh water to a region which has known only scarce water from shallow wells since the 1950’s. A dependable water system has been in the works for the last few years but residents lacked the money to complete it.

Humanitarian service missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints assessed the situation and determined that the Church was in a position to help.  The Church helped to fund the project.  This took much discussion and examination of what would be required to pipe clean water 19 miles through five communities.  The Church provided more than financial aid.  It provided engineering services.

A water distribution system comprised of smaller pipes will deliver the water throughout the village of Tshiabobo to 40 water stations. All the trenches are hand dug by the people in the villages who will receive the water. On one given day, 83 people were requested to clear foliage to make room for the pipeline, and 206 showed up to work.

A significant benefit of this type of water line is it requires no pump or electricity. Spring-capture systems require virtually no maintenance, and they last three times longer than wells. Even in the dry season, the spring source for the project continues to flow at over six gallons per second.

The people have contributed $3,000, which they used to develop the spring sources. Residents will manage the gravity-fed system through a community water and sanitation board. The board’s responsibility is to ensure water quality, determine fees and perform regular maintenance.

A nine inch pipe feeds water from a nearby source and carries it nine miles to the village of Tshiabobo. After this large pipe was in place, the next phase of the project extends the pipeline another ten miles to Luputa. Once the entire project is complete more than 166,000 people will have clean water.

Update — November 2009

Dancing, shouts of joy and speeches marked the end of a significant milestone for residents recently in several villages of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Water finally gushed out from an 18-mile-long pipe to the African villages of Tshiabobo, Mafumba, Kasha, Ibola and will be in Luputa City by next summer.

Members of the project development committee praised the Church for “the end of our misery, for the end of all the difficulties to have a water supply; that we can affirm today has saved our children from the murderous diarrhea and from all of the sicknesses that come from dirty water that have for a long time overwhelmed our people.”

Two more phases have yet to be completed in the Luputa water project. The next phase channels water to Luputa and in the outskirts where 130,000 people live and 34 kilometers from the springs. The trenches for this stage are close to being completed. Water stations will be completed for the small villages of Mafumba, Kasha, and Ibola. Phase three is the final stage of the project, the construction of the distribution network for the people of Luputa.

The objective of the Church’s clean water initiative is to improve the health of communities by providing access to sustainable clean water sources.  Depending on local needs and circumstances, these water sources include wells (or boreholes), water storage and delivery systems, and water purification systems. Since 2002, the Church has helped five million people in over 4,500 communities obtain access to clean water sources.

Clean water projects have enjoyed long-term sustainability because communities are involved in the planning and implementation of each project and community representatives are trained on system maintenance prior to project completion.

Massive Service Day Benefits Thousands

SALT LAKE CITY 27 April 2009

From coast to coast, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints joined hands with friends and neighbors to clean up and serve their communities in a far-reaching day of service.  Hundreds of thousands of volunteers stocked shelves, constructed houses and helped families in transition get their feet back on the ground.

“Helping others is valuable to the person being served but may be of even more importance to the person serving because it causes him or her to forget their own problems for just a few minutes and experience the joy of service,” said Elder Walter F. González, who oversaw volunteer efforts by the Church in the southeast area of the United States.

In Southern California Mormons staged an organized event that summoned some 40,000 volunteers to carry out service projects throughout all of Southern California, including 11 Orange County cities.  Although service is a core value in the Mormon belief system, this is the first time members of its congregations have united statewide on the same day in such a uniform fashion.  Projects included cleaning parks in Cypress, building a park in Fullerton, donating food to the Orange County Food Bank in Huntington Beach, informing residents about proper smoke detectors in Tustin and more.  Though the movement was organized by Mormon congregations, non-church volunteers were encouraged to participate (Orange County Register). Read more

LDS Church Helps Dikembe Mutombo’s Hospital

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO 1 May 2009

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is partnering with the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to create an additional water source for the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital and Research Center, which is located in the capital city of Kinshasa.

Dikembe Mutombo towers over Mormon Church representatives.

Matthew Heaps, who oversees clean water projects for the Church, said,

“We became involved with this project because the hospital seems to be doing all they can to provide quality medical care but still find themselves needing additional resources.  We help them to help themselves by supplementing the hospital’s existing water source with an additional well for consistent and reliable water.”

The hospital, which is a non-profit facility, opened in 2007, and is part of the vision of former NBA player Dikembe Mutombo, who retired in May, 2009, after 18 seasons.  The facility currently has 150 beds with a planned capacity of 300.

“The hospital was built to help the people of my hometown live healthy and productive lives,” said Mutombo, who discussed the project at a 23 March dinner meeting with Church leaders in Salt Lake City.  “This well project will supplement the water we currently have on site and will provide a critically needed supply of precious pure water in case of malfunction or shortages in the public water system.”

According to the World Health Organization, the average life expectancy in DR Congo is 46 to 49 years of age.  Nearly 1 in 5 newborn children do not live beyond their fifth birthday. Read more