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Outreach at Trinity Lime Rock

Our Outreach chairperson is Lynn Gaffney. 

Trinity's Outreach Committee

Here's the current Outreach Committee being introduced and thanked by Pastor Heidi.

Please contact Lynn, or Pastor Heidi, or one of the Wardens if you would like to be involved in one or more of our Outreach activities. 

One new outreach project we'll be supporting at Trinity is "Bead for Life" -- you can read more about it HERE.

The parishioners of Trinity Church are encouraged to offer back to God the various gifts and talents with which He has blessed us. While we do this in many ways, one of the most important is in reaching out to help people outside our own congregation.

Trinity indeed reaches out to our community and the world.  Recently we have donated our time, talents, and treasures to:

  • Back to school backpacks

  • "Feed a family of four for a day" Thanksgiving outreach

  • Christmas gifts for Noble Horizons residents

  • OWL's Kitchen donations on an ongoing basis

  • Offering for Haiti relief fund

  • Church World Service CROP walk

  • The Bishop's Fund for Children

  • The Episcopal Cathedral in Tegucigalpa, Honduras

  • Money for a well in a developing country

  • Upcoming tag sale in May to benefit, among others, Ugandan women

----We regularly collect food for OWLS Kitchen food pantry in Lakeville. 

Our "feed a family of four for a day" program each year generally collects at least 25 shopping bags full of groceries for those in need in our own area.  Regardless of what you may have heard about Connecticut's Northwest Corner as an upscale community, there is still grinding poverty here.  We try our best to help in some small way to alleviate it.

This year, for our "feed a family of four" the parish collected 28 bags of groceries.  The management of OWLS Kitchen greatly appreciated the gift, and also commented that "Trinity ALWAYS bring great groceries!"

More about some of these projects follows -- please read on!

In some cases, our gift to others is ourselves in the form of labor.  In other cases, it is in the form of goods:  food (for example, our ongoing food ministry in cooperation with OWLs Kitchen), supplies, or needed objects we are in a position to provide for others.  Other forms of outreach -- such as our Sports and Recreation ministry program, to which the entire community is invited -- are a bit unusual, especially in the Episcopal Church.  Trinity is proud to be the founding sponsor and current home of the Crescendo music program, serving a community much larger than our immediate area.  And, finally, although we are not a wealthy parish in terms of dollars, sometimes our outreach is in the form of money.

We conduct our Outreach through involvement in many areas, and our congregation takes the lead in determining where and how our efforts will be directed.

Our previous project:

Trinity had a contingent at the 2009 CROP walk, despite the threat of rain, under the leadership of the Rev. Heidi Truax.  We all walked 5 miles and raised close to $300 to alleviate hunger both here at home, and in Africa and the Americas.  

Trinity CROP Walk participants

More CROP walk photos are on the 2009 Photo Page.

Feed a Family of Four for a Day:

In anticipation of Thanksgiving each year, Trinity parishioners provide groceries that will serve to feed a family of four for a day in cooperation with OWL's Kitchen. (Since OWL's Kitchen does not have a website of their own, we are happy to reproduce their current brochure here on our website).  In 2009, the ingathering of bags of groceries will be held on Sunday, November 15, when the groceries will be blessed at the 10:30 AM Holy Eucharist and taken to OWL's Kitchen to help provide for the 80 families they feed every day.

Here is a recommended menu.  Feel free to modify it, but please make sure that all of your choices are nutritious ones.

Breakfast:

1 large can fruit juice (not fruit drink)

1 box pancake mix or 1 box oatmeal or 1 box low fat low sugar cold cereal or granola

1 box powdered milk

1 small box tea bags or 1 small jar instant coffee

1 box cocoa mix

1 jar jam or marmalade

Lunch:

2 packages macaroni & cheese or 2 cans condensed soup

2 cans tuna fish or 1 jar peanut butter and 1 jar jelly

1 large can fruit

Dinner:

1 large can spaghetti and meatballs or 1 box pasta and 1 jar marinara sauce or 2 cans beef stew and 1 small box rice

1 large can vegetables

1 large jar applesauce or fruit

Thank you for feeding your neighbor!

Our Diocese

Like all parishes in our Diocese, a significant percentage of our parish pledge to the Diocese is directed to Outreach at the Diocesan level.

Just before school opened in 2008, we contributed backpacks filled with school supplies -- and Summer Soccer tee-shirts -- for needy young people at North Canaan Elementary School.  They were a big success, as the following thank-you from the Principal indicates (click the thumbnail to see if full-sized):

Thank you letter

...AND in 2009 we did it again!!

Here are some of our other recent Outreach efforts:

Christmas 2007 Outreach:

In 2007, for our Christmas project, we consulted with the Social Worker for our neighboring community of Falls Village -- which has no Episcopal Church of its own (many Falls Village people are members of Trinity, and we view Falls Village as part of our community).  We collected specific gifts for needy young people of that town.

We also collected small gifts for the elderly of Falls Village, such as toiletries, stationery, and the like -- the sort of things that elderly people on Medicaid cannot afford for themselves, but which help provide a small sense of dignity and self-worth in old age.

A recent Outreach project (August 2007):

Trinity partnered with Salisbury Family Services to contribute lunchboxes and non-perishable snack food for needy children to take with them to school this Fall.  SFS delivered the lunch boxes to the recipients during the last few days of August so the kids have them when school starts.

Here's a thank-you the parish -- and particularly our Outreach chair, Cheryl Duntz, received from SFS:

Thank you note from Salisbury Family Services

Our Outreach project for Advent 2006:

During Advent, we "adopted" some local children and provided each of them with a few gifts, much in the same spirit with which we reached out to the children of North Canaan in our backpack project earlier this year.  We held the ingathering of gifts on December 17, the third Sunday of Advent, and the gifts were blessed at the 10:30 AM Holy Eucharist.  Immediately over the service the gifts were handed over to the social workers for distribution to the families.

Click on the photo below to see some of the gifts displayed in front of the Altar.

Gifts for needy children -- Christmas 2006

----Building on a past outreach success with preparing backbacks for needy children to take to school, as the new school year opened some 30 backpacks, complete with school supplies, were donated by Trinity parishioners and were distributed among young people at nearby North Canaan Elementary School.

Here is the text of a letter from the Principal of NCES to our Outreach Chair:

It really is true that charity begins at home, and the thirty filled to the brim backpacks that you brought to our school were absolutely wonderful. The office staff was astounded when they saw the bags and the contents!  If only you had been here to see the smiles on the faces of the children who were the recipients of the generosity of parishioners at Trinity Church.  Select homes were called and one by one, children arrived at an appointed time to receive a bag.  The office staff even enjoyed matching every bag to each child's personality.

How appreciative the children were!  All of the homes contacted were grateful; all of these students would not have been able to arrive at school with materials.  In prior years, it was always a little sad on the first day of the school year to see a child arrive without a bag or any supplies.  That was not the case this year!  Children are still coming to the office to say thank you.  It was truly a wonderful idea.

Please thank everyone at Trinity for truly making a select group of children so happy and well prepared for school.  You would not have bestowed your kindness and generosity on a more appreciative group.

Again, thank you for playing such a big part in getting us off to a wonderful start of a new school year!

Sincerely,

Rosemary A. Keilty

Principal

September 12, 2006

Here are a few more memorable past outreach efforts:

--Trinity is one of a half dozen parishes in our Diocese that actively sought an outreach partner in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and we were selected to partner with the Chapel of the Holy Spirit, the Episcopal presence at Tulane University.  Their building and its contents were largely ruined by Katrina -- effectively leaving the students, faculty, and staff of that great university without a campus home of the Episcopal Church. 

Chapel of the Holy Spirit certificate

Our ECW earmarked $300 from a recent benefit for Chapel of the Holy Spirit, and our Altar Guild assessed our supplies with an eye to furnishing them with Altar linens and other material that would be more valuable to them than to us at this point.

--In November 2005, our organist and choir director, Christine Gevert, organized a "Hurricane Concert" for relief in storm-damaged areas of the South.  Thanks to the Hotchkiss School, the concert, with a choir of well over 100 voices, conducted and accompanied by professionals who contributed their time, raised a significant amount of money for relief. 

--In the past we have helped construct a Habitat for Humanity house in Salisbury, and have been an active participant in the "Adopt a Social Worker" program of Covenant to Care, Inc.   

--In 2004 and 2005, we participated in an effort to assist the Children's Ministry -- an activity of two Episcopal Churches in one of the poorest neighborhoods of New Haven that provides an after school program and other needed support for children growing up in as inhospitable an environment as can be found in the United States.  Interestingly,  our Sunday School students were responsible for this initiative.  Our partnership with the Children's Ministry came from a spontaneous decision by a few of our Sunday School students that they wanted to take up a collection that would go to children less fortunate than they.  We are heartened when we see this kind of spirit in our children, and that it seems to have been a reaction on their part to seeing the new Sunday School rooms provided for them in our new addition. 

At the suggestion of Bishop Smith, Children's Mission was introduced to us, and they were the recipients of that collection.  We also continued our Outreach to them, setting up a collection box (decorated by the same Sunday Schoolers that took up the original collection) to collect craft supplies and snacks for Children's Mission's after school program.  (Click on the picture below to see a full-sized picture of the box and one of the Sunday Schoolers who helped create it.)

Courtney with the box

--Exciting for all of us -- and still memorable -- was the arrival in February 2000 of a family of four from the former Yugoslavia under the auspices of the Interfaith Refugees Ministry. Trinity Lime Rock sponsored this family and helped them to settle into a new life in a new country. 2001 brought further news:  our refugee family acclimated so well to the United States that they have set off to Wisconsin to live! 

--Our relationship with the Children's Mission was not the first major partnership initiated by our Sunday School.  In the past our Sunday School has adopted children in far-off lands, and has been an active participant in the Heifer Project (as shown in the photo below).

Discussion of the Heifer Project at Trinity Lime Rock

 

Prayer for the Right Use of God's Gifts:

Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor thee with our substance, and, remember the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of thy bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

BCP p. 827

 Offering Companionship Along The Way

 

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Website updated Thursday, June 24, 2010 04:48 PM