Lending a Hand During Lent

Lent is the perfect time to remember that giving of ourselves deepens our personal relationship with God and will make the world a better place. As a Dominican community, we actively practice Lenten almsgiving and teach our students to help their brothers and sisters both here at home and around the world.

"Almsgiving is the way we share our blessings with others,” said Beth Odom, Lower School Director of Dominican Catholic Identity. “So many families are struggling today, it is important for us to reach out into our local community, and around the world, to provide help where we can. I like to tell the students that we are the hands of Jesus, working in the world today,” she said.

This year students at St. Agnes and St. Dominic are participating in two campus-wide Lenten projects: an Easter Food Drive for our friends at Project Outreach in Fayette County and the Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Rice Bowl collection.

Our campus held a successful food drive for Project Outreach at Thanksgiving, and due to the overwhelming demand for assistance they are facing, we are rallying our community to help them once again. Project Outreach, created in 1975 by a Franciscan Sister, Sr. Elaine Wicks, serves an area of Fayette County consisting of primarily working poor. The food drive runs through March 12.

The Rice Bowl program may be familiar to many of you who remember receiving the cardboard bowl as a child at mass or at school to collect pennies. This year, our ECC and Upper School students have placed bowls in their classrooms for donation collections, while students in grades K-8 received a cardboard rice bowl to collect coins at home. These bowls will be returned to school during Holy Week and added to the campus donation total.

The concept behind the Rice Bowl is not just to donate extra change that you may have, but to also participate in some small sacrifice as a way to deepen your faith. For example, instead of buying a candy bar when they crave something sweet, the child can put that money into the rice bowl. To participate in this drive, our ECC students are “doing good deeds” at home to earn quarters which they will turn in weekly to the rice bowl collection.

Having gotten its start in 1975, the Rice Bowl concept began as Catholics were looking for a way to respond to famine in Africa. Donations raised through the program now +provide benefit to more than 100 countries worldwide. Twenty-five percent of donations stay in our local diocese to fight hunger and poverty. The funds are used to support projects in agriculture, water and sanitation, health and nutrition education, and micro financing for small businesses.