Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
Dell Big Crow Memorial Holiday Gift Project
Happy Holidays! We are excited to announce the annual Dell Big Crow / Pine Ridge Indian Reservation Holiday Gift Project is underway! As you may know, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is one of the most impoverished and marginalized regions in America. While we seek to address the underlying causes of poverty on Pine Ridge, we
also recognize the importance of building connections between people on and off the reservation. We continue to work at Pine Ridge throughout the year with Service Learning projects, winter coat drives, providing families with firewood, home repairs, winterization, and other sustainable development projects.
2013 marks the 10th year of our Pine Ridge Holiday Gift Project! Last year, thanks to the kindness and generosity of friends, families, hundreds of amazing individual donors, and our colleagues at Colorado State University, the Holiday Project provided over 1,000 gifts to children and elders on the reservation! Donors like you forwarded the original project email on to their colleagues, families and friends and we received responses from all over the U.S. as well as Germany, Australia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, France, Japan, Belgium, New Zealand, the UK, and Canada! We would like to invite you to contribute a holiday gift for a child or elder this year. The project is very “grass roots,” since just two of us “Elves” volunteer and coordinate the project. This year Christine will have very limited availability, so please bear with us if our responses are a bit slower than usual. All of your emails will be going to Julie this year, and I will forward some of them on to Christine when she has time to help. I have a couple of other folks who are planning to help so you may hear from a new “elf trainee” now and then. Once again we are working with several reservation school teachers, counselors, community organizers, social workers, homeless youth centers, the Pine Ridge Veteran’s Emergency Shelter, etc. in order to identify children and elders with the greatest needs. We receive wish/need lists from people on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
2. “Santas,” that would be all of you, contact Julie directly via email.
3. In return Julie will email you the name, age, wish list, and mailing address for a child or elder.
4. You purchase a gift, gift-wrap it, and mail it directly to the child or elder’s home.
5. We would like to gently stress the importance of our recipients receiving gifts of approximately the same value. Most wishes cost $20.00 - $35.00. In these difficult economic times our lists are growing every year, so if you wish to contribute more, please consider “adopting” another child or elder so we can provide items for more individuals.
6. Notably, we usually have a few individuals and families with particularly difficult circumstances who need more costly items such as electric blankets, space heaters, coats, sewing machines, fire wood, etc. If you wish to provide a more expensive gift let us know and we’ll set you up to help them specifically.
7. Please support our project by passing this letter on to your friends,
family, and colleagues….over the years this is how we have grown!!
8. Let us know if you need a tax receipt and we will email it at the end of
the project. If you wish to provide a gift, please email Julie and we’ll send you the information you need to spread a little holiday cheer to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Julie Ann Sullivan
[email protected] . Check us out and post your thoughts on our page! Pine Ridge Indian Reservation – Dell Big Crow Holiday Gift Project https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pine-Ridge-Holiday-Project/139579879425346
Learn a bit about Pine Ridge via Diane Sawyer’s 2011 20/20 Special Edition “Hidden America: Children of the Plains.” To view the episode go to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GACcBe9Be58
