While staying home to raise my young children, I felt a calling deep into a life of prayer and I created this website to share my faith with others. I also felt compelled to share my faith through more tangible acts of service, so I began volunteering with refugee resettlement in my community, which turned out to be a very enriching and eye opening experience.
Because of the amazing families I was blessed to be of service to, I was inspired to create “pennies for refugees,” with a hope to raise one penny for every refugee on planet earth and most importantly, raise awareness of the growing refugee crisis. At the time, there were 70.8 million. Now, the estimate has increased to over 120 million, a number that is expected to grow exponentially in coming years.
Since my calling to raise funds for refugees, I hosted a few fundraising events before taking a job at a university, where I have been able to partner with a program called Every Campus a Refuge to house a family on campus, helped bring in speakers, and organized volunteer support for refugees in our community, radically increasing engagement with refugees in our campus community and hopefully increasing long-term engagement with marginalized populations for a students.
Though I expected to do more traditional fundraising, I am in awe of the Divine Providence of how God has forged creative new paths and unexpected ways to reach that goal. I truly believe God saw my little step out on faith and is blessing me with an increased amount of connections to make this goal achievable.
Though I am not keeping track of the amount of money raised and there is no way to track the amount of impact had by these initiatives that I am blessed to be a part of, I am not going to try. I hope when I go to heaven someday that Jesus can show me that somehow – against all odds – by his grace and power, these small steps into service that I can take do indeed lead to raising 1 penny for each refugee.
Funny the idea for “pennies for refugees” felt so unique to me, but upon reflection – I’d been donating pennies to refugees throughout my whole life through Catholic Relief Services rice bowls during lent at my Catholic Church.
Click here to make a donation to Catholic Relief Services.
One hundred percent of proceeds will go directly to a wonderful faith-based charitable outreach, which does a great job of empowering locals to uplift their own communities.
God, please use this campaign as an opportunity to shine light on the plight of refugees around the world. Bless, protect and guide each and every child of Yours, who has been forced to leave their country due to war, persecution and natural disaster. Open hearts and minds, so this campaign can be a sign of Your great love for every human being, who finds themselves living as a refugee.
written by Nicky Gant for http://www.uniteinprayer.org 7/9/2019. Updated 7.29.2024