NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
November 10, 2004
For more information contact contact Lisa Baumgartner Bonds at lbonds@lwr.org or 410-230-2814.
In this news release:
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Announcing The Lutheran World Relief Community Quilt:
A Creative Way To Give Gifts. A Creative Way To Support LWR.
ANNOUNCING THE LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF COMMUNITY QUILT:
A CREATIVE WAY TO GIVE GIFTS. A CREATIVE WAY TO SUPPORT LWR.
LWR Community Quilt Receives Generous Support from the
Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation
Baltimore, November 10, 2004 — Lutheran World Relief announces an exciting new way for you to give meaningful gifts during this holiday season and throughout the year. The Lutheran World Relief (LWR) Community Quilt, quilt.lwr.org allows you to support worthy causes and honor family and friends with gifts that go well beyond the ordinary.
The LWR Community quilt is a creative way for individuals, families and groups to support the many ways LWR fights poverty, hunger and oppression. With giving opportunities ranging from $40 and up, the LWR Community Quilt helps people in need while enabling you to honor friends and loved ones with gifts you make in their name to LWR’s ministry.
Double your gift! Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation awarded LWR a very generous grant of $125,000 for the development and launch of the LWR Community Quilt Initiative. What’s more, they also have created a challenge grant that effectively doubles every gift of $1,000 or more to the LWR Community Quilt through March 1, 2005. Thanks to Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation for their vision and for their support of this new initiative.
LWR President Kathryn Wolford says of the Thrivent Financial for Lutherans Foundation grant: “It is very exciting to receive the needed support for this major step forward for Lutheran World Relief.” She adds that the LWR Community Quilt is “a strategic key to our future” because it allows LWR to generate the resources needed to strengthen the impact of its mission as well as “respond to our supporters’ desire for a closer, more focused partnership with them.”
What is the LWR Community Quilt? Lutheran World Relief undertakes a wide variety of activities with partner organizations that address poverty at its core, to help families help themselves to escape poverty’s grip. The Lutheran World Relief Community Quilt was created as a way to illustrate that multi-dimensional work, to offer LWR supporters creative ways to give loved ones meaningful gifts that also support LWR’s work and to pay homage to the legacy of quilts that have symbolized LWR’s work for 60 years.
“Deciding on the twelve icons that represent our work, and that make up the LWR Community Quilt was tough,” comments Lisa Baumgartner Bonds, LWR’s V.P. for External Relations. “LWR does so many things so well, we didn’t want to leave anything out,” she continues. The twelve Gift Squares tell a comprehensive story about the positive benefits LWR’s work has on communities we serve.
12 Gift Squares. The twelve areas that comprise the LWR Community Quilt symbolize LWR’s work with: children; education; environment; food; health; HIV/AIDS; justice; peace; relief; water; women; and work. You can support LWR’s life-saving work by sending symbolic gifts from the LWR Community Quilt during the rapidly approaching holiday season and on other gift-giving occasions.
Better than a pair of slippers. Were you thinking of buying your spouse a food processor this Christmas? Enclose a Gift Card that says you’ve made a gift in their honor to support LWR’s work helping communities grow more food. Send a teacher in your life a gift from the Education Gift Square. Send your boss a gift from the Work Gift Square. There are endless creative ways to give meaningful gifts through the LWR Community Quilt. And each one supports the work LWR does every day in 35 countries around the world.
A group effort. The LWR Community Quilt also is designed for groups to use to raise money to support LWR’s mission and ministry. Quilting groups, choirs, youth groups, scout troops, civic organizations, Sunday school classes, any group really, can commit to funding all twelve Gift Squares to complete Your Community Quilt. When a group completes its quilt, it gets to name the completed effort, and is recognized in a variety of ways, depending on the level Your Community Quilt was funded.
Wolford added, “We created the LWR Community Quilt for our supporters, in response to their many requests for unique ways to make additional and more creative gifts to LWR while also offering a comprehensive way to explain our multi-faceted ministry.”
Here’s how it works: Donors use the secure LWR website, quilt.lwr.org, or the printed LWR Community Quilt Catalog, to purchase individual quilt “Gift Squares” at funding levels from $40 to $5,000. Recipients of gifts from the LWR Community Quilt are notified with a beautiful, customized gift card, which can be sent electronically, by mail from the giver or by mail from LWR. Individuals and groups may commit to purchasing all twelve squares and thus build their own LWR Community Quilt.
For more information about the LWR Community Quilt, to purchase gifts or to request free catalogs, call LWR at 1-800-LWR-LWR-2.
