6th Annual – Montessori Community School Fun Run
Wednesday, April 17th 2013
(Please note the change in date from the school calendar.)
The two main service projects that our school is involved with are the Adopt A Native Elder program and also COEEF (Children of Ethiopia Fund).
For the past seventeen years our school has raised money, in various ways, for the Adopt a Native Elder program, to provide financial assistance for our three adopted Navajo grandmothers- Roseline, Emma and Elvira who have chosen to remain living on a reservation and spent their lives living in the traditional life style as role models for their children and grandchildren. For the past ten years our school has also raised money to pay full tuition to allow our girls in Ethiopia to attend school. Only 25% of girls in Ethiopia are afforded the opportunity to attend school and COEEF has built schools in Ethiopia for the express purpose of providing education only for girls.
For the past six years the main fundraising event to support our grandmothers and young girls in Ethiopia has been our Spring Fun Run. All of our students participate in the event. The children collect pledges from family and friends who are interested in supporting these two programs and the children run laps on the Lower Field to earn the money that has been pledged. 100% of the money earned goes directly to our grandmothers to whom we provide certificates throughout the year for them to buy food, clothing, general incidentals and firewood and for the tuition for our students in Ethiopia.
There is still a great need within the Adopt a Native Elder program for support of other grandmothers and we hope to be able to adopt another grandmother. That will be determined based on the funds raised at the Fun Run this year. Last year we only raised about half of what we had raised the year before so we do not want to over commit ourselves. Over the next couple weeks, the teachers will be talking to the children about service to others and in particular about our grandmothers and the students we