What One Can Do...
Creative MDG Ideas for
your Diocesan Convention
Diocesan conventions are amazing opportunities to capture the imagination of your diocese for God's mission of global reconciliation. Be creative. Make the MDGs come to life. Below are just a few ideas ... but we want to hear yours, so send us what you did at your convention and we'll get it up here.
Child Mortality Cross
A child dies every three seconds of preventable, treatable causes. The "popsicle stick cross" makes that statistic real and powerful. Here's what you do ... pick a timeframe (say, the length of one session of convention, or the length of a convention day), figure out how many children will die during that time and order that number of craft sticks (the multi-colored ones work best, you can order them here from ssww.com). Get a piece of board roughly 4' x 6' and lay a base of the sticks in the shape of a cross and glue a second layer on top of it. Have several tubes of wood glue available (it has to be wood glue or else the sticks won't stick -- and get a bunch 'cause you'll go through the fast) and leave lots of the unused popsicle sticks lying around the cross. Make a big sign like this one that tells that the popsicle sticks in this cross represent the X children under five who will die during whatever time period you have chosen. Have a couple people working on gluing the sticks at all times, but invite anyone who comes by to join in.
When you are finished, you will have an icon of the 30,000 crucifixions that happen every day ... and perhaps a powerful focal point for your closing worship service. Be sure and have lots of information available about child mortality and What One Can Do about it. For example, you can highlight projects in your companion diocese relationship, or ERD/HopeAfrica's NetsForLife program, which targets saving young children from malaria. After convention is over, you can give the cross to a church for use in a children's chapel or take it on the road to raise awareness about MDG #4.
Here are some pictures of this activity at the Diocese of West Missouri's convention.
Here are some pictures of this activity at the EGR booth at General Convention.
Here's a youth dialogue presentation that makes a great accompaniment to the cross.
Women and girls in Africa spend 40 billion hours a year carrying water. It's not just about people not having the basic human right of safe water to drink, it's millions of women and girls who aren't being allowed to become the people God dreams for them to be. A simple way to give people a physical experience of this reality is to fill a 5 gallon water cooler bottle with water and challenge people to pick it up and carry it as long and as far as they can. If you can, have a track that people can walk that goes around the inside of the hall where convention is going on.
110 million children don't have the opportunity to go to school because the schools aren't there or the can't afford to. What would universal primary education (MDG #2) cost? $10 billion a year -- half of what Americans spend on ice cream. What it would be like if you hadn't gone to school, if you couldn't read. Why not invite people to take a literacy test and find out. Walk up to them with this form of gibberish on a clipboard and ask them to fill it out. They'll probably give you a very strange look. You say "is there a problem?" And then you talk to them about the 110 million children who can't go to school and how comparatively little it would cost to keep them from feeling like they feel now every time they tried to read something.
MDG World Relationship MapFor a great graphic representation of the ways your diocese is already involved with the MDGs, put a giant world map like this one on a bulletin board. Then invite people to put an adhesive flag strip with their name/parish on it wherever they have visited, have a relationship, have given money or in any way have contributed to global reconciliation and the MDGs. Not only will you end up with a powerful visual representation of how much you're already globally connected, you're gathering lots of great data for future use about What One is Doing right ther in your diocese!
Maternal Mortality Children's Story Event
This one takes a little more orchestration but it's a powerful way to demonstrate MDG #5 -- stopping half a million women dying each year from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Get a group of 40 or more women together and have each bring a picture of a child who is meaningful to them -- could be their child or grandchild or anyone. Together they will begin to read 1-2 children's books out loud (one woman should take the lead with the actual book, reading and showing the pictures ... the rest will have scripts). After each line of the book, one woman's script will end and that will be her signal to "die" -- to quietly walk away from the group and tape/pin her picture of a child to a wall or bulletin board nearby. the reader is the last one to go. If you do more than one storybook (it will depend on how big a crowd of women you have), make sure whatever the final story you read is left unfinished. at the end you will have no more mothers left and a wall of children who have been left behind.
EGR did this at General Convention (see pictures) and it was incredibly powerful. Choose simple, familiar children's books like "Goodnight, Moon" or "I'll Love You Forever". Click here for more information and photos from the General Convention event.
Another idea from Evelyn Piety of West Tennessee: ERD is making one "real" bednet per diocese available because there have been so many requests for them. Work with your ERD diocesan rep to get one, set it up at convention with a cot or air mattress underneath it and "rent" out nap time for a contribution to Nets For Life. Ann Fontaine of Wyoming reports that ERD also provides a "mosquito template" for kids to color and use to pledge to buy nets. If you can't get ahold of your ERD diocesan rep, contact ERD's Luke Fodor and he'll help you out.
Remember those 110 million kids who can't go to school and that it would cost $10 billion a year to achieve univeral primary education -- half of what Americans spend annually on ice cream? Educate people at your convention (or in your congregation after church on Sunday morning) by giving away free cups of ice cream with that statistic either written on a label and stuck to the cup or printed on card with information about universal primary education and What One Can Do. An excellent source for information is the Global Campaign for Education. You might want to use the literacy test (see above) here as well.
A child dies every three seconds from preventable, treatable causes related to extreme poverty. Maybe you've seen the "Click" ad the One Campaign put out that demonstrates this. Do it at your convention. A couple options -- work with your convention leadership to get some time in front of the whole convention and lead the whole convention in snapping their fingers once every three seconds (it's incredibly powerful to hear a whole convention hall full of people doing this -- we did it in the House of Deputies at General Convention), and then a brief talk about what the diocese is already doing about child mortality and what more can be done. Or, if you can't get time in front of the whole convention, during a break get 8-10 people to stand together in a crowded place (a hallway, or in front of the coffee) in silence snapping their fingers in unison every three seconds with signs taped to their shirts with the "one every three seconds" statistic. We also did this at General Convention and people started coming up and joining us. As always, have information available about positive things people can do to reduce child mortality.
You can also do what the youth group and outreach committee at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Glenwood, MD -- make your own ONE Campaign Video. They did the "One by One" ad, you could do that or the finger snap ... or something else!
The lack of women's voices in positions of power is a poverty for us all. One way to demonstrate this is to have a pause in the business of convention for all the women in the room to come forward. Have the men who are left look at them and think of all the contributions they have made to the life of the diocese -- and to their lives personally. Then have the women walk in silence out of the room and have a minute of silence for reflection on the poverty that would exist in the diocese without the gifts of these women. Provide information about women's empowerment and opportunities for engagement. If you want to be a little more daring, have women put gags over their mouths for a pre-determined period of time (15 minutes, half hour, hour) with a sign attached to them with a statistic like this:
"Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property. (Source :World Development Indicators, 1997, Womankind Worldwide)"MDG Book Nook and Schwag Stop
What Can One Person Do: Faith to Heal a Broken World -- simply the best MDG primer out there. Perfect for individual or congregational study.
Eradicating Global Poverty: A Christian Study Guide on the MDGs -- an excellent six-session study guide.
God's Mission in the World - a study guide jointly produced by TEC and ELCA that emphasis our opportunities in political advocacy.
Mission and Ministry through the MDGs -- a wonderful, theologically grounded study resource from the Diocese of North Carolina.
Also, contact Mary Getz at ONE Episcopalian and she'll send you lots of ONE-E stickers, brochures and sign-up cards. Here's an order form to get bags of 100 ONE white bands at the bargain price of $33 (that's 2/3 off the normal price).
Check out the Resource Page for lots of other downloads you can print out and give away.
