The pennies, dimes and nickels tossed into jars at Women’s Institute meetings around the world don’t seem like much, but together the coins add up to big change.
The Pennies for Friendship march held at each WI meeting, where members toss their spare change into a container, funds the Associated Country Women of the World, allowing it to do its charitable work for rural women around the world.
“We need the pennies to do the work we do,” said ACWW president Ruth Shanks.
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Since its first meeting in 1933 and its first international convention in 1947, the ACWW’s goal of helping rural women hasn’t changed.
“We are a voice for country women around the world,” Shanks of Dubbo, Australia, said at the ACWW Canada Area Conference in Camrose June 13.
Resolutions passed at the first convention, about adequate nutrition and training for farmers and their wives, are still relevant today.
“The need will always be there,” Shanks told the group gathered from across Canada.
She said she sees the difference the organization makes when she travels to ACWW projects around the world: giving small loans to farm women, building orphanages, developing new water facilities or providing computer training for rural girls.
“There is always a person with need. We don’t live in a utopian world where there is no need,” she said.
Large non-profit organizations are able to fund large scale projects, but ACWW focuses on grassroots projects that will help benefit country and rural women in poor countries.
ACWW past-president Dr. Ellen McLean of Nova Scotia, said the organization has always strived to make a “positive change in women’s lives.”
The money given to women in Lesotho bought chickens and they sold eggs produced for extra cash.
“It was the first time they had money because they sold their eggs,” said McLean.
Local women told McLean about the vision they had for their community. It was all possible because of some coins tossed into a jar at WI meetings thousands of kilometres away.
