Multiplying Letters Like Loaves and Fishes

Just before Thanksgiving, I had the amazing opportunity to give a presentation on Bread for the World and the ONE Campaign and the importance of letter-writing and advocacy at the first BFW/ONE event held at the UT Episcopal Student Center and The University of Texas, Austin (Hook 'em Horns).

However, this inaugural gathering was no introductory awareness-raising foot-in-the-door type meeting - it was a full-blown Letter Writing Party!  U2 music was playing, pizza was served, and eighteen students wrote a total of 50 (fifty!) letters in an hour and a half on a Thursday evening!

The students and their campus pastor wrote letters to their senators, their representatives, and several of them even wrote letters to friends and relatives with BFW/ONE materials, urging them to also take action!  The timing couldn't have been better either, with the push for the President's request for poverty focused development assistance (detailed in the post below) going full steam ahead now (and with Sen. Hutchison (R-TX) on the Appropriations Committee).

Truth be told, it took a few meetings with students and the campus pastor in the preceding months, as well as a powerful "U2charist" a few days prior, before this event came to pass - but I wanted to share UT Episcopal's successes partly out of my own excitement and to pat them on the back, as well as in encouragement that it doesn't take much (or many people) to be a prophetic, advocating voice for the world's poor and hungry people.  Remember, 8-15 handwritten letters is all it takes for your congressmember to take serious notice on an issue!  Major props to UT Episcopal!

"Young people say what good can one person do?  What is the sense of our small effort?  They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.  We can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment.  But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes."

Dorothy Day

P.S. If you're on Facebook - join the Bread for the World group!