Circle Thrift Sends Our Love to Puerto Rico

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Let’s celebrate Circle Thrift’s successful fundraiser for Puerto Rico via Mennonite Disaster Service  this weekend! It’s a chance for us to remember what we can do together.

Here’s a note form Martha Grace, Circle Thrift Director:

We dedicated all the sales at all the shops from Saturday Oct. 7th to Puerto Rico relief  through  Mennonite Disaster Services and the total is $4797! We are rounding up to $5000. That’s a huge day for us. We usually make about $3600 on a Saturday, but we had staff telling everyone checking out about the fundraiser and most said “keep the change” or made an extra donation. Thanks!

More than two weeks after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, the island’s power grid remains in shambles, and authorities say it will take months to fully restore electricity. Nearly 90 percent of the island is still without power. Many of us in Circle of Hope have connections to the island, either through family or friends. From what we’ve heard first hand (which hasn’t been as much as we would like due to the lack of electricity) and on the news it will take years to recover. How easy it would be in this moment to tune out or despair. What can one little person do with such a big problem?

Circle Thrift began in 2004, on the first floor of our building on 2007 Frankford Ave. For the first few years, business was rough. The avenue was not as bustling, it was tough to find the right personnel, and any small business takes time to establish its clientele. There were several moments when we had to get creative to keep the doors open. But eventually it took off and it is now a fixture of Frankford Avenue. In 2007 we started a second store at 1125 S. Broad (in a basement no less!) and in 2008 we moved the original store down the street to 2233 Frankford Ave. using a human chain to move much of the merchandise. Now we plan to give Mennonite Central Committee $100,000 each year, plus we regularly find ways to share more, like we did this weekend.

We budgeted to give away more than $30,000 locally.

Keep your hearts soft, my friends. We can never do enough, and that’s okay. Jesus will have to be enough in the end. But when we give what we can, get together, and keep at it for years like we have with Circle Thrift, we can do so much!
Visit circlethrift.com for more info.

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