How your church can get involved with Ripple Effect

By Ann Hatton, Community Manager at Ripple Effect

I’ve been working for Ripple Effect for the past 10 years and I love my job! I love speaking with and meeting our supporters, hearing from them and helping them to find the best ways to get their church community engaged with our work and inspired to fundraise and make a difference.

I have a close relationship with the programmes team in Africa, especially now that we can meet online so easily. It’s always exciting to hear news directly from colleagues who are working alongside farmers in rural communities. It’s good to learn about the successes and challenges that they are experiencing so that I can then share this news with our church supporters to encourage them and ask them to pray.

It’s always exciting to hear from churches and find out about the creative ways their congregations have been fundraising. When I receive donations from them, whether they are small or large amounts, I know that they are sent with love. And when they are from churches who have been supporting Ripple Effect for a number or years, those donations mount up significantly! Whatever a church can donate will make a significant difference to the communities we work with in rural Africa and it’s a real privileged for me to have a relationship with churches who are passionate about this work.

There are so many ways churches can get involved with our incredible work in rural Africa! Here are a few suggestions, but please do get in touch with me as I’d love to hear from you and discuss what would be most suitable for your church.

1. Twin your church garden with Ripple Effect and your donation of £120 could help families living in rural Africa, with three years training in sustainable organic farming. Starting with small kitchen gardens, families can grow enough to eat, set up small businesses, send their children to school and go after their dreams.

2. Support our work at Harvest, Christmas or Lent. Take a look on our website here for the most up to date resources.

3. Become an Eco Mission Partner. If you’re an Eco Church, you might be interested about our eco mission partnerships. Here’s what our patron Bishop Ruth says: 

“I want to encourage you to think about working with Ripple Effect to see how you might engage in the environmental crisis. Some of you will have been working towards your Eco Church Awards… How might you discover more about the climate crisis for others in other parts of the world?... Becoming an Eco Mission Partner is about committing to supporting families working alongside Ripple Effect. You’ll find out how to pray and how to effectively work with them on some of the projects they are engaged in. Having that ripple effect where your actions have an impact on others and they on their community too.”

4. If you’re not sure yet what you want to do, sign up to Making Ripples, our 6 weekly church e-news, so that you can keep up to date with our work. It has top tips for Eco Churches, prayer and news updates and information about the latest ways you can support our work.

We’re really excited about having a stand at the Christian Resources Exhibition (CRE), Milton Keynes this autumn (9-10 October 2024).

We absolutely love it when people come to our stand and ask us questions about Ripple Effect. We love to see familiar faces of existing supporters, but we also love to meet those of you who’ve not heard about Ripple Effect before and help you to understand more about what we do.

This year at CRE we will be promoting Garden Twinning. We’ve found that churches involved with Eco Church Awards, especially, love to twin their church gardens with Ripple Effect! There’s a synergy with our work in rural Africa and what churches are doing here in the UK: we work with families who are living on the very front line of the climate crisis and churches across the country are working really hard to reduce their carbon footprint and support our global neighbours.

If you’re going to CRE, please do come and visit our stand!

Interested in getting your church involved? Contact me to discuss your options by calling 01225 874 222 (ask for Ann Hatton), or by emailing me directly at ann.hatton@rippleeffect.org.

Find out more about our church activities here.