By Donna Baranski-Walker | Executive Director, The Rebuilding Alliance
Dear All who have supported our Beam of Light Soccer Intiative,
Today is the final day for GlobalGiving’s Give More Get More challenge. Please take a moment to make a donation to help complete our funding for the Beam of Light Soccer project.
From now until 11:59 Eastern Time, EVERY DONATION IS BEING MATCHED by GlobalGiving.com Please give now at http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/lights-for-ramadan-soccer-tournament/
This project has been a small miracle in a time of great hardship and despair in Gaza. Your donation really mattered. When your gift was augmented by a small grant from a family foundation, amazingly, despite the blockade, the Rebuilding Alliance was able to successfully install the first unit of a community center in time for the Rachel Corrie Ramadan Soccer Tournament! The portable office unit included a transformer so we stretched our small grant to install lights along the walkway out to the field, and added new sand, fully levelled to improve the field! Cindy and Craig Corrie personally delivered gently used soccer uniforms. UNRWA cleared the rubble of demolished homes away from the perimeter of the field. We have YOU, our committed supporters, to thank! We hope the hundreds of donated shoes we collected will be allowed in on the next delegation – and we’ve received a seed grant to develop a creative strategy to get doors, wall cement, and windows into Gaza, for so that the soccer players from Ybnah camp can fix their neighborhood’s damaged homes.
How did this project get started?
Our commitment to Gaza began when we contacted the family whom Rachel Corrie sought to protect when she stood before the bulldozer that would demolish their home. The Rebuilding Alliance brought that family to the U.S., joining Craig and Cindy Corrie in a nationwide speaking tour – and we raised the funds we needed to rebuild their home. They and many others in Gaza who knew and cared about Rachel, formed themselves into the Rachel Corrie Sports Initiative to give back to the community.
This past December and January, when faced with the immense loss of life and destruction of Gaza neighborhoods, the Rebuilding Alliance put peacemakers in Gaza and peacemakers in Israel on the phone line, every three days, to tell hundreds of people across the U.S. and Europe what was happening, and brainstorm ways to help safeguard families in Gaza and in Sderot, Israel and make this stop.
When the assault ended, we listened hard to our friends at the Rachel Corrie Sports Initiative who said, "Start with Soccer" -- as soccer could immediately draw neighborhoods together to help heal the trauma that each person had experienced.
And so you did.
Please make another gift now to help us finish the “Beam of Light” project. The funds you donate will complete the lighting of the soccer field. Wooden posts, instead of steel, will keep costs down.
And your donation will extend a ripple effect of goodwill and healing where it is so deeply needed.
Please give now at http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/lights-for-ramadan-soccer-tournament/
With Sincere Thanks, Donna
By Donna Baranski-Walker | Executive Director
By Donna Baranski-Walker | Executive Director
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