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This Giving Tuesday I support the Alleluia Fund for Outreach - please join me!

Paul Shackford volunteering at St. John's soup kitchen
By: 
Paul Shackford, CFO

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and successful holiday shopping on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A day to give thanks, two to get deals – but what happens today? There is a new and growing movement, Giving Tuesday, when non-profits, families, businesses, community centers, and students around the world are coming together for one common purpose: to celebrate generosity and to give. This Giving Tuesday I am supporting the Alleluia Fund for Outreach – and I ask each of you to join me!

Our support of the Alleluia Fund transforms lives and strengthens our neighborhoods. The diocese’s outreach partners provide practical, “hands-on” support to those most vulnerable in our diocese and the wider world; they welcome, help, feed, and shelter our neighbors in need and promote health, fight disease, and respond to disaster internationally. Today, on Giving Tuesday, our ministry partners will offer a hot meal and warm bed to a homeless man, provide diapers and formula to a mother not able to afford them for her infant, encourage an at-risk, low-income student, and much, much more.

More than 30 programs applied for 2014 Alleluia Fund grants with funding requests totaling $273,350. Our Giving Tuesday gifts will have an immediate and direct impact on our response and go directly to support outreach and mission in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, with no overhead or administrative costs. Key areas of support include food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, education for youth and adults, and international outreach.

In this season of thanksgiving, when we celebrate God's abundance and our opportunity to share, I hope that you join me and become a part of a new tradition of generosity.