A special thank you to all the volunteers and donors for helping with the Arts For Peace project. Below is an update feed of what we did to make sure that these children received their Essential Binders:
- Spring 2012 – We have been waiting for this day! Finally, pictures from Tanzania have arrived, showing children from schools in the rural areas receiving our Essential Binders. The packages were shipped to Tanzania almost two years ago, but the distribution process was waylaid by bureaucracy, red tape, customs delays, and other related issues, but all issues are now resolved, and the Binders are in the hands of the children.
- Spring 2010 – ThinkGlobal Arts Foundation shipped 800 Essentail Binders to Haiti school children. This was all possible in partnership with Wheatland-Salem Church and RR Donnelley & Sons. We thank all the Volunteers from “Up With People” and Wheatland-Salem Church, who made this possible.
- September 2, 2009 – ThinkGlobal Arts Foundation have finally received pictures of our Essential Binders being distributed in Tanzania! This is very exciting for all of us! This has indeed been a long, exciting, and sometimes frustrating journey for us, but all is well that ends well! Ashwin Sampat has shared these fantastic pictures with us!!
All this magic started to happen June 2008 when ThinkGlobal Arts Foundations, donors, and volunteers learned that schools in Malawi and Tanzania are very poorly furnished, to the extent that they may not even have CHALK to write with. We feel if each family in Naperville, IL would contribute at least one pencil, we could ship it to Africa! This was the start of “Arts For Peace”, a plan to help the impoverished children in 24 schools in Malawai and Tanzania. It is planned that this community-wide charity event will try to collect new and/or used art materials in boxes conveniently located around Naperville. Volunteers will package the materials into kits (a kit will consist of everything needed to complete an art project). The kits will be divided equally to impoverished elementary schools by shipping 1,200 to children in Malawi and 1,200 to children in Tanzania.
Supplies were collected from September 15, 2008 – October 1, 2008 at the following locations in Naperville:
- District 203 Administrative Center, 203 West Hillside Road
- All District 204 Elementary Schools
- Anderson’s Book shop, 123 W. Jefferson Avenue
- Kroehler Family YMCA, 34 S. Washington Street
- Fry Family YMCA, 2121 W. 95th Street
- School of Performing Arts, 200 East 5th Avenue, Suite 132
- Xilin Asian Community Center, 1163 e. Ogden Ave, Suite 301