Tea Reception

If you've been listening lately you may have discovered a link between "3 Degrees Connected" and "3 Cups of Tea". 

If you not heard about our organization, we would like to tell you that we are a group of women in West Michigan who are learning that by making connections, we can encourage women to follow their dreams of owning their own company or being responsible for their own destiny.  These connections are a vital part of creating word of mouth referrals for local owned or operated businesses.  This is only a small part of what this organization stands for.  Although we are focused on West Michigan, we also help women and girls a world a way by becoming more educated on the plight of women throughout the world and assisting where we can.  

If you've not heard of "3 Cups of Tea", you've missed a New York Best Seller, and an excellent account of how one man pursued a mission to build a school in Pakistan primarily focused on meeting the educational needs of girls.  Since 1996 his dream to build one school has turned into a mission to educate as many children as possible.  As of his last writing, in the book "Stones to Schools", Greg Mortensen has built 131 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

You might think that is a great accomplishment in such a short amount of time and indeed it is.  At a recent program at Grand Valley State University where Greg spoke, he indicated that in 2001 there were 800,000 children between the ages of five and fifteen who were enrolled in school.  By 2010 this number has increased to 8.5 million children with 2.5 million of those children being girls.  While Greg was growing up in Africa, he learned an old proverb that went something like this "Educate a boy and you change an individual, educate a girl and you change a village". 

Although the availability of education in Pakistan and Afghanistan has greatly improved in the past decade, there are still 118 million children in Pakistan and Afghanistan who have no access to education.  Of those school-aged children 78 million are girls.

Why do we care?  Well, as a non-profit organization, 3 Degrees Connected has set forth a mission that we want to help women.  The Pennies for Peace program is a way that we as an organization can involve our community, by collecting pennies.  When Greg first started his mission to build one school, his largest donation was made by school children in Wisconsin.  They donated 63,000 pennies.  Realizing that in our society pennies are viewed as worthless coins, we would like to collect those "worthless" coins and make a difference through purchasing school supplies and/or contributing toward the building of a school.  The Central Asian Institute is the organization behind the Pennies for Peace program and they provide a wealth of resourceful information to show how these pennies are changing the world.

We will kickoff our Pennies for Peace campaign by sharing our first cup of tea on Saturday, May 22, 2010 at KP Galley in Spring Lake Michigan.  Anyone wishing to help us with our pennies for peace campaign can come by KP Galley at 9 a.m.  We will begin planning our community-wide tea reception slated for next spring.  We had planned a community-wide tea reception, but circumstances indicated that it was wiser to put all our efforts into our penny collection this year and having a larger kickoff event in the spring of 2011. 

We will be collecting pennies along the lakeshore from May through August 2010 and with the aid of several local Girl Scout troops, we will count and roll pennies throughout the summer months.  If you would like to help us count, please stay tune for date and location.