Fallsington Friends Host Right Sharing of World Resources
Put your stamp on it!
Have you ever wondered what happens to those cancelled stamps that we turn in at our meetings? Or ask yourself, how can that little used stamp make such a difference? Well, wonder no more, as thanks to our Friends at Right Sharing of World Resources, these questions were answered on May 13th at Fallsington Friends, as we learned about yet another wonderful Friends organization.
Right Sharing of World Resources (RSWR) is an independent Quaker not-for-profit organization sharing the abundance of God’s love by working for equity through partnerships around the world.
Fallsington Friends would like to thank Marjorie Schier, who brought the program to our meeting several decades ago and we are grateful that her impact continues to this day.
Please note that RSWR is happy to come out to any of our meetings to do a presentation and they have some great ideas about how our meetings can help in other ways, such as hosting a simple meal which could be a fundraiser and/or used to raise awareness of needs around the world.
And now, so as not to keep you in suspense, here is a short summary of the stamp program and its connections to RSWR taken from their website:
Since 1996, the Quaker Missions Stamp Project has collected and sold used postage stamps and used the proceeds to fund Quaker organizations like RSWR. Brad Hathaway founded the project and was its steward until 2009, when Earl Walker took over the stamp ministry. From 2009-2017, Earl raised over $11,000 for Right Sharing through the Quaker Missions Stamp Project. In 2017, Indianapolis First Friends Meeting became the new home for the stamp ministry. Amy Perry and Brad Jackson are the current co-coordinators.
RSWR gives grants to groups of marginalized women in Guatemala, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and India to fund individual micro-enterprise projects. Right Sharing’s work is grounded in a sense of stewardship for the world’s material, human, and spiritual resources.
An example of RSWR’s work is Juhudi Friends Women Group (JFWG), a group from Maragoli, Kenya that RSWR helped form and train as part of their Capacity Building Training. The women all have retail businesses in Mbale market.
The initial beneficiaries were twenty, middle-aged women working to rise out of poverty through vegetable vending, second-hand clothes sales, grocery kiosks, and charcoal resale. The group is a mixture of tribes and religions, including several Quakers and one Muslim.
You can read more about this group on the RSWR website.