Michigan —Every year the Great Lakes Adventist Academy (GLAA) student association (SA) does a Christmas project to help the less fortunate. As they were searching for ideas, an ADRA Really Useful Gift Catalog arrived in the mail. It included many different ways to donate money to the needy across the world. Students could choose to give for specific needs. Gifts ranged from as low as one dollar to as high as $3,800 and included gifts such as feeding one child for a day in Haiti, helping poor Mongolian families sell chicken eggs to earn an income, preventing blindness in one child through vitamin A capsules, and many more.

When our SA sponsors and officers saw this, they thought it would be a great idea for their Christmas project. Rachel Hopkins, SA president, presented the idea to the students before Thanksgiving break so they could share the project with their parents and relatives.

When students returned after Thanksgiving, SA sponsors and officers visited the dorms to collect the donations. In the boys’ dorm, over $500 was donated within 30 minutes.

“Boys were swarming the table to give their money. It was so amazing, because they weren’t doing this to get anything for themselves. They were there to give to others,” said Jason Boothby.

The girls’ dorm also had good results. Kendra Knudson donated money to send a girl to vocational school. “For only $10 I sent a girl to school. Something so little was able to change a girl’s life for the better,” she said.

One student who works at the bookstore was looking through a particularly old book when a one hundred dollar bill fell into his lap. He went and told his boss what he had found and was told that he could keep it. Instead of keeping it for himself, he donated it to the ADRA gift program.

In all, 148 students donated $1,513.70 for ADRA.

Alaina Elder, GLAA junior