CROP Hunger Walk

2007 CROP Walk:
Sunday, September 16 - 3:00 p.m.

See the Greater Lexington CROP Hunger Walk Blog
for information on the 2007 Walk.

Each year more than a quarter million CROPWALKERS put their hearts and soles in motion to help stop hunger, one step at a time, in some 2,000 locally-organized CROP WALKS and other community events.

In 1999, 29 local churches are participated in the Lexington-Fayette CROP Walk sponsored by the Downtown Christian Unity Task Force. Funds raised help Church World Service provide disaster relief, development programs, training and education, and better health to people around the world. Twenty-five per cent of the funds raised locally go to God’s Pantry to relieve hunger in Central Kentucky.

Recent walks have helped:

• In Lexington, 25% of the funds raised in our CROP Walk is used by God's Pantry to feed the hungry in our area. Last year that was over $3,000.
• In Chechnya Church World Service is providing $95,000 for relief food and meals for displaced persons in this war-torn region.
• In Honduras and Nicaragua, more than 80 CWS-sponsored volunteer construction teams have begun or completed more than 1,000 new homes.

The seventeenth annual CROP Walk is Sunday, September 16, 2007.
The sixteenth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 24, 2006.
The fifthteeth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 25, 2005.
The fourteenth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 26, 2004.
The thirteenth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 28, 2003.
The twelfth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 22, 2002.
The eleventh annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 16, 2001.
The tenth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 17, 2000.
The ninth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 19, 1999.
The eighth annual CROP Walk was held Sunday, September 20, 1998.

On September 20, 1998, the Downtown Christian Unity Task Force (DCUTF) sponsored a CROP Walk to raise funds for helping Church World Service in their programs for the hungry throughout the world, including the United States. In 1997, they raised $7,774. They share these monies, 25%, with the local God's Pantry. The 1998 Walk began on Sunday afternoon at Second Presbyterian Church. (A preliminary estimate is that about 225 walkers participated and raised about $8,000.)

Each year since 1947, more than 3 million friends and neighbors across the U.S.A. walk or sponsor a walker to help stop hunger around the block and around the world. The walkers walk because they are concerned about those who often walk great distances for food or water. These are community, interfaith events organized locally and coordinated by the regional offices of Church World Service.

Church World Service is a ministry of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. In partnership with indigenous organizations in more than 70 countries, including the U.S., CWS offers opportunities to join a people-to-people network of local and global caring. Constituent communions include most of the mainline denominations and affiliated organizations include many of the familiar global agencies.

Monies raised not only pay for food needs in natural disasters but also other forms of assistance such as:

• $10 can buy 50 chicks for a family in Bosnia
• $20 can give 330 treatments of Oral Rehydration therapy to children suffering from dehydration
• $80 can provide tools of hope such as 15 hammers and saws to families rebuilding after hurricane devastation on Mexico's coast
• $100 can provide 500 tree seedlings to grow in Africa.

Each day in the village of Maziyaya, in the Southern African nation of Malawi, Zcharia and her children had to trek downhill to the river and back up three times -- miles each day -- to get water. And the water wasn't clean.

In fact, six out of ten people in rural Malawi lack access to safe drinking water.

Today, Zcharia and her neighbors have safe, clean water right outside their homes. Their village is one of hundreds in Malawi where Church World Service has helped to drill deep wells, 33 meters (108 feet) in Maziyaya, that reach down to the aquifer where the water is clean.

Zcharia heads up a group of ten people -- most of them women -- chosen to be responsible for maintaining the village's new pump and well. Women are always a majority on these committees, according to Ms. Chisono Gunda, of the Christian Service Committee, CWS's partner in Malawi. "Because women are most affected by the hardship of distant water sources, they're most likely to get behind the project."

In a year's time, 50,000 more Malawians have gained access to clean water thanks to CWS/CROP.