Green Options

Craft Hope is a faith-based, love inspired project designed to share handmade crafts with those in need, and their goal is to combine love for crafting with desire to help others into a project to make a difference around the world.

I’ve been very inspired this season by 30 three-, four-, and five-year-olds.

In my daughter’s Montessori classroom, the children are crafting shoebox busy boxes for the CASA children’s advocacy group. Each shoebox, which will also be decorated by the preschool children, will be filled with craft kits, books, and small toys. These shoeboxes will be given throughout the year to CASA advocates, who in turn will give the shoebox to the child for whom they are advocating, at their first meeting. The shoeboxes will serve as an icebreaker, provide cooperative activities to help adult and child bond, and relieve boredom for children who must sit through court trials and meetings on their behalf.

When all the plans for the natural, midwife-attended birth of my second child went way south on a weekend car trip, ten hours from home and six weeks early, I was fortunate to be living in a part of the world in which a hospital with a state-of-the-art NICU facility was just an hour further down the highway–with my midwife’s help by cell phone I was able to contact it minutes after my water broke, and was snugly checked in and being introduced to my baby’s neonatologist before my first contraction had begun.

In many parts of our world, my fragile baby would have been born and then would have died for lack of necessary medical care; in one part of the world, you and I as crafters can help these babies live.