This past Sunday, November 7th was Orphan Sunday. It's an initiative to bring awareness to orphans, foster care, adoption and raise up people and organizations to stand in the gap for orphans and the families and organizations that support them. Our church, Austin New Church (ANC), has many families adopting this year and just recently supported two organizations that help orphans.
On October 23rd, a team of friends and family from our church called Restore the Orphan ran in the Chosen: Marathon for Adoption. I (Holly) personally ran the half marathon. It was very hard, but a lot of fun. I don't think I'll be running a half marathon again. You can see pictures of me running here and you can do a search for the last name of anyone you know who was running and see their pictures also. And you can see the elevation of the run from my RunKeeper activity but it didn't capture all of the run as I lost GPS signal at 10.19 miles. We had several fund-raising events leading up to the marathon for our own ABBA fund at church for the families adopting. Proceeds from the event will go directly to families adopting in our area and from our church.
October 31st was the fifth Sunday of the month so ANC always does church on those days in our community and city by serving at several different projects called Serve Austin Sunday. This month we held four garage sales all over Austin to raise money for Help End Local Poverty (HELP). Roger and I worked a huge garage sale of four Restore Communities (community groups) from our church and it was a great success. Long and exhausting but so worth it because we sold $3,572 worth of excess stuff we all had in our homes. All four garage sales together donated almost $11,000 to HELP. And with this donation they were able to complete the funding for their orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and complete the funding to dig a water well at their orphanage in Marondera, Zimbabwe. HELP sent a delegation to Haiti this past week and you can follow them on their visit at their blog.
Our next big event, Restore the Innocent, ANC & Restore Austin are partnering with HELP, Music for the City and Austin Angels to bring awareness to the injustice of sex-trafficking. It will be held on December 7th at 6:30 pm at the Blanton Museum of Art. We will be showing the film Call & Response then heading to an after party hosted by Music for the City to discuss the next steps for fighting this crisis. 100% of all proceeds will go to fighting human trafficking. So, join us in raising awareness and engaging the fight!
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