April 30, 2012 issue
Appetite for generosity
MCC relief sales healthy in spite of challenges
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It takes more than lightning bolts and layoffs to dissuade supporters of Mennonite Central Committee.
Combining the total of four relief sales across the United States April 13-14, proceeds were up.
At the Kansas sale, the total was tens of thousands of dollars higher than last year, despite the threat of severe weather.
The second day of the sale transitioned into a volatile evening in which hail up to the size of softballs and more than 100 tornadoes hopped and twirled from Oklahoma to Iowa, taking six lives and offering only destruction in return. One tornado that plowed through parts of Wichita, Kan., was one mile wide.
Attendance was lower, but people still showed up — some driving for hours and hours — for the April rite of putting a good cause before one’s health and gorging on New Year’s Cookies.
Umbrellas were everywhere as the West Coast sale in Fresno, Calif., defied persistant rains to slightly top last year’s total and raise about $180,000.
At the Idaho sale, the event in Nampa beat 2011’s $31,225 with about $44,000.
In Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania sale raised $319,000 in Akron’s backyard, short of 2011’s $338,333.
Despite angst over MCC’s recent restructuring — which put dozens out of work and laid aside the binational approach to nearly a century of U.S.-Canadian cooperation — we line up to eat things we probably shouldn’t and defy conventional fiscal prudence.
While cash gifts to MCC in Canada and the United States were down $4.6 million and $5.5 million in fiscal year 2010-11 from the previous year, relief sale income rose by nearly $100,000 in the same period.
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