Allamakee County Corner of Hope Growing Project raises record $61,500

Allamakee County’s Corner of Hope (COH) Growing Project completed another successful year with a record amount of funds raised, $61,500. That locally raised total reflects the combined efforts of receipts from harvesting and selling crops of corn, soybeans and hay from eight different plots across the county, along with generous contributions from churches, banks, agri-businesses, and individuals, and many contributions of products and services to help plant, grow and harvest the crops.

This year’s amount has been remitted to Foods Resource Bank (FRB), “…a global, grassroots community dedicated to ending word hunger… one garden, one field, one village at a time.” FRB is comprised of 15 Christian church agencies and the projects chosen to be funded by FRB are administered by those agencies. They are aimed at helping local farmers in the most impoverished areas of the world become self-sufficient in food production.
As in the first seven years of the COH Project, monies from this local initiative are to be divided equally between projects administered by Church World Service, Catholic Relief Services, and Lutheran World Relief, reflecting the ecumenical involvement and spirit of the Corner of Hope.
Over the past eight years, the COH Growing Project has raised more than $260,000, all dedicated to helping the most hungry of the world to feed themselves. “This amazing response is an appropriate recognition that we have been blessed beyond measure to live and farm in the most productive region on the face of the earth,” remarked the COH Coordinating Committee, with representatives from a cross-section of churches in Allamakee County. The Committee further feels an obligation to share that blessing.

The COH Coordinating Committee wishes to express its deepest gratitude to the many individuals, churches, banks and businesses for their support in 2012 an in past years. A more complete "thank you" will appear in a later edition of The Standard.